I spent the past couple days writing and then revising my story for this week's magazine, so I'm in no state to blog intelligently about Iraq.  Which, I think, is a good state to be in when thinking about the way Iraq is debated by American politicians.  The whole thing seems like theater to me.  The people who are actually here, doing their damnedest to make this work, may be running out of ideas.  They now face the choice of either confronting Shiite militias and risking an anti-American insurgency among Iraq's well-armed and well-organized Shiite majority, or hanging back and allowing sectarian violence to escalate.  Being smart and committed, having a great plan, won't necessarily help anymore.  It's possible every option we now have is a bad option.

But no American politician with anything to lose or gain by discussing the issue of Iraq can say that publicly.  So if you're, say, Ned Lamont, you're stuck taking positions like this:

Lamont emphasized he’d keep U.S. troops right next door in Kuwait ready for action in case they were needed to deter Iran and Iraq’s other neighbors from intervening in its internal politics.

“We’re not abandoning the people of Iraq,” Lamont assured a crowd in Wilton, Conn. six days before he won. “We are going to be there for humanitarian assistance” and reconstruction, he said.

I try not to pay attention to American politics unless absolutely necessary, but this seems less like a "position" and more like a politically-motivated attempt to keep people from realizing that a proposal to admit defeat and leave Iraq is something other than a proposal to admit defeat and leave Iraq.  Iran and Iraq's other neighbors are already intervening in Iraq's internal politics.  What is the Lamont threshold beyond which we would re-deploy our retreated troops to Iraq to do battle with Iran and its proxies in Iraq?  It's a silly question to ask, because the practical answer is that once we leave we'd never go back.  That's certainly one way out of Iraq, but politics doesn't allow anyone to make that argument forthrightly.

Lamont's plan resembles Peter Galbraith's plan.  Here's an excerpt of Galbraith's article, along with some scene-setting by David Frum (Galbraith's article is locked away in the New York Times' online ADMAX).  Galbraith proposes moving American forces to Kurdistan, where they'd be in a pro-American region and close enough to Sunni Iraq that they could sally forth to stomp on any attempt by al Qaeda to establish a foothold.  Again, there are practical considerations—once we leave western Iraq will the public have any stomach for periodic clearing operations in haunted towns like Fallujah, Ramadi and Haditha?  Given our relatively limited ability to gather intelligence on the Sunni insurgency when we're sitting right on top of it, how would we even know if al Qaeda had gained a foothold within the complicated tribal and insurgent networks of Anbar Province?  This seems like an intellectual version of Lamont's predicament—how to practically acknowledge defeat without giving in to the hopelessness defeat will spawn.

I'm not sneering at these proposals.  Personally I don't think the situation is so far gone that retreating from Arab Iraq is our best option.  But it's not crazy to consider that possibility.  I just don't have the stamina to play the eternal optimist and think of a best-case scenario for managing defeat.  The reality may be a lot more dire than even these plans take into account.

 

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