My take on Iraq

Subadei asks me a pretty serious question about what I support the US to do in and about Iraq, and it deserves a serious answer.

You support an effective pullout? A complete redployment from Iraq? What of Kurdistan?

I believe that the United States can not achieve anything that vaguely looks like a positive strategic objective from our continued presence in Iraq. Instead Iraq is draining our treasury, and draining any potential for good will and willfully cooperative international actions for other large and pressing problems. I also believe that a good deal of the Sunni Arab insurgency is nationalistic and homegrown with little long run use for the foreign crazies. I believe that the combination of thirty years of authoritarian rule, a history of coups, and the destruction of the few communal trust exchanging institutions in the past four years makes the best case scenario of a Dayton like agreement fairly far off. I also believe that most of the ethnic cleansing and relocation (except in Kirkuk) has already occurred. I believe that Kurdistan will have to suffer de facto independence and live with that until some type of general settlement can be reached with Turkey, Iran and Syria.

So I support over the course of six to nine months the US military going from 160,000 uniformed personnel in country to going to under 1,000 with a couple of brigades stationed in Kuwait as a rapid reaction force for very low probability events. That means telling the Kurds that they are on their own, that means the Sunni-Shiite civil war will accelerate, and that means that we can not count on any oil coming out of the country.

Now will that actually happen, no, so I support anything that begins to wind down US involvement.