Half-Withdrawal?

I agree with Ross Douthat when he says that "drawing down" American troops from Iraq -- but still leaving a substantial force there to "combat al-Qaeda" or whatever -- may be the most politically feasible outcome, but would be disastrous nonetheless.

I don't know what to do about Iraq (obviously). But it seems to me that you can either look at the ongoing, low-grade civil war as something we have a moral and strategic obligation to prevent from spiraling out of control, in which case we need to follow Petraeus's lead and be prepared to continue the surge for months and years to come, regardless of the absence of a political settlement (and with the long-term hope that the violence will gradually diminish, and that Iraq circa 2015 will look like, say, Bosnia today); or you can argue that the cost of occupation to American national security outweighs our moral and strategic interests in preventing a greater bloodbath than we have now, in which case we ought to focus on getting out completely. (Or pulling back to Kurdistan, though I'm more skeptical than Andrew is about that option; his suggestion that "the Turks and the Kurds can become an arc of hope" for the region sounds an awful lot like like the frequent pre-Iraq War suggestion that "Iraq's Sunni and Shi'a can become an arc of hope" for a divided Middle East.) In other words, I swing back and forth between supporting Bill Kristol and supporting a hasty-as-possible withdrawal. But I suspect we'll get the worst of both worlds instead: A continued U.S. presence and continued U.S. casualties, and a steadily-worsening civil war that we're helpless to prevent.

I don't ever support Bill Kristol on anything, but I believe that Douthat is right: if we pull out entirely, we're not talking civil war anymore; we're talking genocide. If we keep a moderate-but-not-decisive level of troops in Iraq, we're accomplishing nothing, but doing so at a fairly great cost. If we maintain large troop levels, the situation will not improve quickly, but marginal gains may be made which could add up over time, and full-on genocide-as-proxy-war averted. The international community has done this in the former Yugoslavia, with a pretty good result. Maybe we can get something resembling Bosnia in a decade or so. That outcome isn't assured, but we can be pretty certain what will happen if we leave: another Rwanda, but with modern weaponry and funding from Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. That seems unacceptable to me.