The Republicans don’t have a plan for Iraq either, and they never have. Well, they did have a plan, but it was a stupid one doomed to failure, which is how we got stuck in this mess. You can thank the little gang of neocons for that. They dismiss all the social sciences out of hand yet consider themselves qualified to manipulate one of the most volatile and unstable regions on earth.
I am unaware of any Middle East expert who gave the plan better than a 50 percent chance of realizing success on any level (and there were very few who were that optimistic). Implementing the neocons’ plan with no more certainty than a coin-toss seems at best a little irresponsible. Colin Powell knew it. That was the point of his pottery barn analogy. And, it’s not just the geography we are now responsible for, it is also all the consequences that follow. Bush senior also knew and states so in his book A World Transformed :
•"To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant a latter-day Arab hero. It would have taken us way beyond the imprimatur of international law bestowed by the resolutions of the Security Council, assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war. It would only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability and destroy the credibility we were working so hard to reestablish."
Removing Saddam was not the end of the war, but the beginning. How do you stop 25 million people who are determined to have a civil war? In the long run you cannot. In the short run you do what Hussein did, hold them down with brutal force. You will know that the civil war is really going when the Kurds start to be annialated. The only thing that will unite the Shi’a and Sunni will be a temporary alliance to kill the Kurds and reclaim the northern oil fields. And, any kind of real or semi-Kurdish state is out of the question because Turkey will never allow in on their border. Syria would like to see the Kurds all dead also. And then there is the Iranian presence.
Leaving Iraq will not be the factor that brings terrorist here. They will do that in their own time anyway. What being there has and is costing us is the intelligence information necessary to intercept those future attempts. If we have no friends, do you really think we will get all the information we really need? Immediately after 9/11, Syria and Iran both provided valuable information pinning the attack on OBL and tracking him to Afghanistan. I seriously doubt we can expect that kind of cooperation again any time soon.
We are going to leave at some point and it does not make any difference whether it is this year, last year, next year, or 10 years from know because the result will be the same. Bush is staying because he won’t admit to failure and the Democrats will not commit to bringing the troops home because they are weenies and insecure. In the meantime, innocent Americans and Iraqis will continue to die. In the long run, because of his stupidity, arrogance, and incompetence, Bush may ultimately be responsible for the deaths of 10s of millions of Americans. That is the legacy his tenure in office will leave to America.