Iraq: FUBAR

I believed that the risk of Iraq becoming a colossal failure (and the risk to us if it did) was far greater than any benefit we'd achieve by deposing Saddam. I've stated the reasons behind this belief clearly and repeatedly since the day The Decider announced his decision but, as we all know, it wasn't a particularly common belief among my countrymen. And so we invaded Iraq.

I can't help but wonder now, what if. After we pulled Saddam out of his hidey hole and our Mission was declared Accomplished, what if we had locked down the country and sealed the borders? What if we hadn't all just accepted (for years!) the same tired White House talking point about how more boots on the ground weren't necessary and how the Generals "were getting everything they asked for." What if we'd had enough troops to lock down the country and seal the borders? Could we have prevented the influx of foreign fighters or stopped the insurgency from strengthening? Could we have bought the country enough time to heal itself if we'd been able to police the environment ourselves instead of relying on the emergence of the militias that are now hell bent on waging a civil war?

What if we'd engaged the Iraqis to rebuild their country instead of turning it into a cash cow for Halliburton and Bechtel? Would it have fostered a sense of nationalism? Boosted the standard of living? Would people have been less willing to kill each other if they were working side by side toward a common goal?

What if all the people who were so passionately determined to wage this war were willing to go fight in it? Would we still see 50 Iraqi war deaths a day?

OK, I admit that it's notoriously unhelpful to backtrack through the land of What If and, really, I am trying to move on to a more productive level of discussion. But the more I ponder how to pull a win out of this mess, the more I come back to whether it was ever actually possible to win in the first place. And if the whole mission was doomed to failure at the start, what are we hoping to achieve by staying now? On the other hand, if the current mess is merely the result of sloppy execution, are our failures reversible? Or have our failures moved us past the point of any salvage operation success?

We found ourselves rid of Rumsfeld last week, a progenitor of the current Iraqi chaos. I'm not sure how that's going to cure any of what ails us at this point -- it's not like his removal is going to enable us suddenly to unshit the bed. And yelling at al-Maliki to make Iraq pull itself up by its bootstraps is unlikely to be effective, either. Saddam's removal created a power vacuum and civil war is on the direct path to filling it.

Ideally the end game would still be a strong, nationalized, pro-western democracy with zero-tolerance for terrorism/terrorists. The problem is that the U.S. is fighting an insurgency in the middle of a country that seems determined to fight a civil war, while Al-Qaeda - always the opportunist - is attempting to co-opt the anti-American cause to give momentum to their movement.

If we started pulling out over the next few months and let Iraq wear itself out with civil war, what would be the likely result? I suppose the Kurds would take their ball and go home, leaving everything outside of Iraqi Kurdistan up for grabs (with possible repercussions to Kurds in Turkey and Iran). Then the Iraqi civil war victor will take the spoils (maybe the victor will even spit out a non-oily land carcass for the losers to keep).

Would any civil war scenario create the ultimate al-Qaeda safe haven? I can't imagine any new power base wanting to keep them past their current usefulness. The only thing our withdrawal would do for them is to provide short term propaganda. Truly, if we were focused on destroying al-Qaeda (without an Iraq distraction, like it should have been to begin with), there is nowhere they would be safe from us -- they'd be marginalized and small, not gaining urban warfare experience and recruits like they currently are.

If we stay in Iraq, there might be hope in dramatically increasing the number of troops so we can go back to square 1: locking down the whole damn country. I can't believe that wouldn't require a draft, though, or at the very least a big "Uncle Sam Wants YOU" campaign. If we stay without increasing troop levels then what's the point? We're going to be stuck in the middle of a degenerative situation for a long, long time and there will never be a guarantee that Iraq won't start descending into civil war the minute we leave. The Iraqi government may be able to eventually neutralize any threat from the insurgency but they won't be able to neutralize the kind of threat that comes from within.

Hopefully James Baker, Lee Hamilton, and the Iraq Study Group have some new ideas because I'd say things are looking a bit dire. Depressing.