If we pull out and leave a weak and undefendable Iraqi government, is it possible the Sunni/Bathist elements can regain control?

I opposed the invasion but we invaded. So we're there. What now?

Is it possible to train sufficent defense and civil forces to defend the current status quo government? If so, how long will it take and how much will it cost?

If you can answer the 1st question in the affirmative and the 2nd with reasonable amounts of time and money. I think we should stay. Then we'd at least have stated metrics with which we can gauge our progress.

This is the type of information I keep hoping the President would provide. He never does. You'd think a Harvard MBA could produce the basics of project management. If it then becomes apparent our plan is not working, then we can consider bailing.

I opposed the invasion becuase  1) I felt it was unnecessary, 2) the Bush administration had impressed me with their incompetence and 3) I feared if we went in, we'd be where I see us now. We can't stay and we can't leave.

IRAQ <-- It's Really Another Quagmire (I got this from Bartcop) 

It's easy to convince me that our forces are the problem and that our polices caused the problems but, it does seem reasonable to ask, "What it we leave and everything really turns into chaos?" Would we have to go back? Would the UN put together a multinational force to stabilize the situation? How much of that force would be... our troops? Are any other nations in the world, in concert, capable and willing to keep order there, in our absence?

Ideally, that would be the solution. We get out, we throw off our role as occupiers and the rest of the world cleans up the mess. Then, we owe everybody a favor, but I could live with that.

Is it possible?

Another possibility is that the USA intended to have an Iraq that can't act nationally. 

I think Juan Cole and pretty much everybody else have overdone the Baathist tyranny. Those Shiites and Kurds who owe their position to the USA then take too much advantage, and use their militias to kick around people they don't like.

Whatever else they did, the Baathists were nationalist and unitary, not as the c.w. goes Sunni slavemasters.

If we left you can bet the old nationalists would win power again... by definition they beat our Iraqi friends, who spent the last 25 years of war in Iran and Britain and the USA! What do you think the American colonists would have done if Britain had installed Benedict Arnold as governor general of the American colonies? I just doubt there would be much civil war. The guys we brought it would skeedaddle back to Picadilly Circus without the US army there to help them.

On the other hand, it's fair to ask, what are we going to do if we stay? CAN we train the Iraqi forces? Is stabilization possible? Will our presence prevent civil war and chaos? If so, how?

It appears to me the current plan is to have our army hemmorrage just long enough for Bush to skip town so he can blame the failure on whatever politician is responsible and patriotic enough to clean up his mess.

We must stay to stop the chaos our presence causes.

We can't leave because we'll leave the chaos our presence caused.

We must fight the terrorists our fighting creates.

We must stabilize the country we destabilize.

The occupation Iraqis hate must remain until they love us. 

Soldiers must die so they do not die in vain. 

We can't leave because we're there.

QUAGMIRE. 

touche.

General Odom was on  the radio the other day, and responded to this --- he said that a trained military that gets ahead of the political process will mean the military will take over and you will get a military dictatorship. The political solution has to include nationalist Iraqis.

There is no way around that if you want to get out, you have to negotiate with the rebels, even if they are Baathists. Who is really afraid of a national Iraq?

If you think that's impossible ok, but then the USA is going to lose. If I'm a rebel looking at this situation, I'd say ok, I have 1/1000th the money of the USA, I have only the most basic types of weapons. I can't engage the USA with armor or in the air. and yet in a couple years I am winning the war of public opinion in the USA. If this keeps going I will win utterly in three more years, and if it takes a year longer, well I live here and the USA does not.

Saddam definitely was not the solution, he was a big part of the problem.  But by unilaterally invading then occupying Iraq a legitimate argument can be made that Iraq was more stable with Saddam.  I wanted Saddam gone back when he was at war with Iran. He was using mustard gas and other chemical weapons against the Iranians.  Then after the first Gulf War he gassed the Kurds, he was a true monster.  But going in without a plan and removing him made a horrible situation truly tragic...

I think the key is the way we went about this, basically spitting in the face of the international community, mocking the UN inspectors when they said they could find no WMD (they were right, Bush was wrong), bribing and bullying governments to support us, deceiving the American people, being arrogant about how easily we could transform Iraqi society, ignoring the entire history of the decline of imperialism in the post-WWII world, etc, ad nauseum. This way of doing things was doomed to fail from the start. That's why slogans such as "staying the course" are a recipe for continued American deaths. We need to stop offensive operations and let international and regional organizations with some crediblity help Iraqis determine their future. No more Americans should lose their lives, because we are held hostage to a bad policy. We can help to finance Iraq's reconstruction.

I am not oblivious to the mess that our conduct of the war has caused.  I just think we need to be both clear and honest with ourselves about the alternatives.  Should the Democratic Party's position be that leaving Saddem in place no matter what was better than removing him?  Should be that Bush did a miserable amazingly incompetent job but it was a wise idea executed terribly?  Do we belive that American military use is always unacceptable and a cause of problems?  Do we like strong men in chaotic situations?  In reading the Cafe, I am totally confused not about what people would do now, that is confusing, but what people think about Saddem, Iraq, Tito and Yugoslavia and other similar situations.

I don't think that Cole disagrees that strongly with the notion that US troops are the problem. That's why he argues for getting them the %^$%%# out of the job of patrolling urban areas with all deliberate speed. In his favored scenario there would still be US forces in Iraq, but they would be much less visible to the average Iraqi. You wouldn't have a bunch of guys in buzzcuts patroling the streets who speak not a word of the local language and have developed a reputation (rightly or wrongly) for randomly shooting people or carting them off for indefinite detention and torture.

Yes, they'd be superseded by people who do speak the language doing very similar things. Yes, they'd still be hated and attacked in their enclaves. Yes, they'd still drop bombs on noncombatants at least some of the time. But getting them out of day-to-day operations for which they were never really qualified in the first place would arguably be better than what's going on now. (And of course what's going on now isn't politically or logistically sustainable, so our choice may be between an orderly retreat and a rout.)

What I got out of reading Cole was that the US's choices are pretty much between bad, really bad and catastrophic. And that having US soldiers remaining on the front lines leads to one of the latter two outcomes. 

The problem, alas, is that foreign policy is complicated.  It cannot be reduced to a frame or sound bite or spin for any other purpose than conning people or stoking emotions. 

Not all thing we want to do are doable.  That was always the major case against the war in Iraq.  That was always the major case against invading Russia or fighting a land war in Asia (and woe to those nations who ignored those lessons). 

All you had to do was to dust off a few histories of the various and sundry prior Western adventures in Middle Eastern occupations.  And we thought we were going to do it on the cheap. 

Too bad Bush goes to be early or he might have caught Lawrence of Arabia on TCM sometime before he met the neocons.

So Clinton had no reason to apologize for doing nothing in Rwanda?  If military action is necessary in Dafur, and the rest of the world is obviously content to do nothing, should we do nothing?  The United States has interests in all corners of the globe. As you said in your original post on this subject Saddem murder millions of people or at least lead to their deaths do we do nothing? Should United States policy be that when there are enough TV pictures to make us feel badly enough then we wonder why we did nothing?  

The world is a dangerous place.  We need desparately to build  the international structures needs to help peace to the world.  But in the end the United States is the worlds policemen with the military and economic might to do what the rest of the world would like done.  We should not be reckless or stupid or arrogant but we cannot hide.

If our forces are the problem in Iraq does that mean that Saddem was the solution?

Uhm…yes. Saddam was a solution. That is to say, not whacking our enemy's enemy was preferable. Saddam was a nasty dictator but an acceptable status quo as far as the global WOT is concerned.

I am not sure I like your analogy Josh, which unlike Cole and Gilbert Achcar's lid on a boiling pot, or valcano, leaves one with at least a source of heat to remove in the anology;

The core of your argument is stated from the beginning when you talk about "the lid the US military is keeping on what could be a volcano." Using the same "lid" metaphor, I would reply that the lid that the US military is keeping on the Iraqi situation is precisely what makes the pot boil so dangerously and threaten to explode at any moment.

We can deduce that the heat is US policy. Obvious to this, is to reduce the heat and lower the flame.

Unfortunately, glue and solvent leave us with the glue dissolved and sitting in a puddle of solvent awaiting a spark, which are ubiquitous in the Middle East.

The selection of an appropriate solvent is guided by theory and experience. Generally a good solvent should meet the following criteria;

1)It should be inert to the reaction conditions.

2)It should dissolve the reactants and reagents.

3)It should have an appropriate boiling point.

4)It should be easily removed at the end of the reaction.

Using your analogy we have the Powell Doctrine, which does not fit the current situation.

I think the problem may lay in our thinking too small, which is how to contend with a failed Neoconservative foriegn policy in Iraq, that replaced the Cold War policy previous to it. The solution may very well need to be a reassessment of US foriegn policy and National Security goals, with reassurance to the world in general and the Middle East in particular, that our policy is not to establish and maintain a unipolar hyperpower world.

Because one has the power to do a thing does not necessarily mean that one has to do that thing. If we wish to measure up to the greatness of our own heritage, then the American people may need to seek and find an avenue of peace through the dust of September 11, and the smoke of Bagdad. If we do not, we are headed for another World War. Since we are unable to treat the symptoms without killing the patient, we need to focus on the killing of the disease. It is not necessarily be in our self interests to be the, "New Rome".

I do not think Democrats are the party of cut and run either.  I meant that we have been successfully painted that way.  One reason Kerry seemed like such a good candidate was he was a war hero.  I fear Democrats are, or at least were, seen as a party not quite trusted with the safety of the Nation.  That might not be fair or right but no one said the Republicans play fair.