I Heartily Concur: Daniel Radosh

Daniel Radosh becomes the first two-time recipient of the "I Heartily Concur" tag, thanks to his post yesterday about the next round of Iraq-withdrawal debate. He's talking about the possibility, voiced by the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and the Iraqi Foreign Minister, and mentioned in the New York Times, that "the departure of American troops could lead to sharply increased violence, the deaths of thousands and a regional conflict that could draw in Iraq’s neighbors":

Let's be clear: to the extent that this is true, and I think it's quite likely, it's the invasion and occupation that will have caused it, not the withdrawal. The war has made these disastrous results virtually inevitable. We tried to warn you four and a half years ago. Yes, the continued presence of the U.S. military has forestalled the worst of it, but if bad shit is going to happen, it's going to happen regardless of whether America withdraws now or in five years or 10 or 25 — or simply stays until its resources are so degraded that it is no longer an effective deterrent. Nothing this or any conceivable U.S. administration has done or could possibly do in the future is likely to bring about a different outcome.

I think this is a critically important point that is being totally overlooked (which is of course why I'm blogging about it, so that those of you who read this will be able to help re-frame the debate. Since there are only about 20 of you, though, it'll have to happen Breck-style: they told two friends, and so on, and so on...) -- it's not our leaving Iraq that's going to cause the country to collapse; it's our arriving and sticking around for the last four years. The die has been cast, the horse is out of the barn, the ship has sailed; it's gonna happen whether we cut and run, stay the course, or do anything in between.

So that leads to the question, why continue to throw American dollars and lives at a situation which is a lost cause? Maybe it's our mess and we have a moral responsibility to clean it up -- that's an argument that I'm not sure that I agree with, but is at least worth thinking about (of course you'll never hear anything like that from the current administration because that would require acknowledgment of a mistake made). But if that's the case, and we need to help fix things, then we need to come up with a different way to do it. The current way isn't doing anything except pissing people off, and the people getting pissed off are the kind of people who like to blow other people up.