Katie: What Happens If We Leave Iraq?
That may soon change. As the Senate begins two weeks of debate on the nation's military budget—and just as "Groundhog Day" seemed likely to play again—Republican supporters of the president started slipping away, from George Voinovich to John Warner to Pete Domenici to Olympia Snowe.
For the first time, a swift American exit from Iraq seems a real possibility. But what would that policy mean for Iraq, for its neighbors, and for the United States?
In most of the plans under consideration, some US forces would remain to defend Iraqi borders, train security forces, and go after al-Qaeda. But American troops would no longer protect Iraqi civilians, or contain all the fighting we've seen between various religious and political factions.
The trouble in trying to determine what-happens-if-we-pull-out is that expert opinions are as divided on the question of the aftermath of an exit as they are on the question of whether to exit. And, of course, nobody has a working crystal ball.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a very smart Middle East expert at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes that "an enormous, quite possible genocidal, Sunni-Shiite clash exploding around American convoys fleeing south" is what would follow a US pullout. He argues that the senators who are now so quick to embrace the withdrawal recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report should bear in mind that it "lacked any sustained description of the…consequences of a shattered Iraq."
He warns of the dominance of the majority Shiites in Iraq with backing from a strengthened (and terrorist-supporting) Iran. He warns of Iraqi Sunnis—allied with al Qaeda—fleeing to Jordan and threatening the moderate government there. And he warns that with Jordan in trouble "peaceful Palestinian evolution on the West Bank of the Jordan river is about as likely as the discovery of the Holy Grail." He warns of destabilized Sunni leadership in Egypt and Saudi Arabia racing to obtain nuclear weapons to compete with a nuclear Iran. He warns of a weakened America less able to defend Afghanistan from a resurgent Taliban. In short, Gerecht believes all hell would break lose.
It is at this point that I'm reminded of Harry Truman's wish that he would only hire one-handed economists. Because with Iraq, as with the economy, there is another hand.
Nir Rosen is a very smart Middle East expert at the New America Foundation. He writes that a "potential" civil war is in fact already underway "in large part because of the American presence" in Iraq. He argues that, in staying, the US is fueling—not putting out—the sectarian fires. The Sunnis and Shia would be better able to compromise, he writes, because they wouldn't be branded as traitors by their constituents for working with a de facto American government. He argues that most of the insurgency is a resistance to American occupation—"nationalism, not intramural rivalry." The insurgents fight as revenge for their treatment by US troops who raided their homes, and killed their relatives, in anti-terror campaigns. He writes that foreign jihadists represent only a tiny percentage of the violence and that they want a Muslim super-state, which is fundamentally at odds with what the Iraqis want, a strong Iraq. Iran and other undesirables in the region would be no more powerful because "Iraqis are fiercely nationalist—even the country's Shittes resent Iranian meddling."
In the end, I think Stanford's Jared Diamond put it best. He said that "any speculation as to what will happen following an American military withdrawal is just that, speculation." And the only way to know what will happen is to watch—and pray.