Iraq is a gamble
Nearly everyone who had a hand in championing the Iraq war is urging the administration to renegotiate the Status of Forces Agreement so that U.S. forces can remain inside Iraq past 2011. This appears to be the new conventional wisdom in Washington: that whatever you thought about the war in Iraq, you should be able to see the strategic necessity of keeping large numbers of U.S. troops inside the country for decades to come.
There are any number of ways such a long-term presence could play out. The best-case scenario is the one Paul Wolfowitz suggested: that, much like in Korea, the U.S. presence will be a stabilizing force that helps keeps the peace and improves America's geopolitical position.
There are, however, ample reasons to question the Korea analogy. The most obvious, of course, is that U.S. forces in Korea were designed to defend the country from an external enemy across a clear border. That's not the case in Iraq, where the major threats are internal. Despite the reduction in violence, the surge failed to fully route al-Qaeda in Iraq and the sectarian fault lines that spurred the country to bloodshed still exist. And unlike North Korea, America's internal enemies in Iraq have no qualms about attacking the U.S. troop presence there.
The other scenarios for a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq are less than ideal, including a resumption of violence. In such an instance, U.S. troops would almost certainly be called in to stamp out the fighting. But there will be far fewer of them in 2011 and beyond than in 2007. So any decision to renegotiate a U.S. troop withdrawal is potentially a decision to continue a counter-insurgency war in the country en-perpetuity.
Few of the analysts stumping for a long-term troop presence seem to want to grapple with the possibility of a resumption of large-scale violence - it's a specter they invoke to justify why troops should stay but not something they appear to think will actually happen on any large scale. Which is curious, frankly. It's worth remembering that 130,000 U.S. troops could not stop Iraqis from slaughtering each other in a brutal wave of sectarian violence. It stands to reason that 50,000 U.S. troops, along with Iraqi forces, would similarly be unable to stop a determined upswing in insurgent violence.
(AP Photo)
