Exit Stage Left
The Hidden Columnists--Nicholas Kristof Edition (13 Nov)

Kristof's latest column (here's the link to the full column for Times Select subscribers) asks the $200 billion question:

So how do we get out of Iraq?

It's easy to be antiwar, and tempting just to blast away at the Bush administration for getting us into this quagmire. But the essential question is how do we extricate ourselves, and that's a hard one to answer.

Well, he doesn't provide an answer in this column (though he does leave a teaser at the end to watch for his Tuesday column, where supposedly he will reveal all), but he does break down the problem into two possible streams:

Cut our losses This has an obvious merit: Iraq may fall apart no matter what we do, and if we're going to give up and pull out we should do so now rather than wait until after we've spilled more blood.

That said, immediate withdrawal strikes me as utterly immoral. A surgeon who botches an operation should not walk off and leave the patient on the table with a note: "Oops. This didn't go as planned. Good luck, but I'm outta here."

What would happen if we pulled out right now? Southern Iraq might devolve into quasi-theocratic city states under a heavy Iranian influence, with neighborhoods controlled by militias like the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army. Anbar Province could become a Taliban-style terrorist training ground that would destabilize Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Baghdad would be a war zone, with Sunni and Shiite militias slaughtering each other. In Kirkuk, Kurds and Arabs would fight for control of oil wells and for the city itself. And Kurdistan would drift toward independence, leading to skirmishes with Turkey and conceivably even to a Turkish invasion of Kurdistan.
[...]
An immediate pullout would also confirm every prejudice about America's not being able to stomach casualties. Wherever we deployed troops or diplomats in the future, our enemies would try to blow them up to drive us out.

Stay the course This is President Bush's current policy, and it neglects a central reality: our very presence feeds the insurgency.

I came to realize how much the neocons lived in a dream world when I visited Najaf, Iraq, in September 2002 and quoted ordinary Iraqis as saying they would fight against any U.S. invaders. Neocons who favored an invasion were apoplectic and felt sure that they had a much richer understanding of the situation - even though they had never been to Iraq, spoke no Arabic and didn't know a minaret from a mihrab. They were well meaning but didn't have a clue about the horror that Iraqis felt for a Western military occupation.

Unfortunately, many of them still don't. The fact is that in a country like Iraq, our troop presence creates insecurity as well as security. Our presence antagonizes much of the population, becomes a magnet for jihadis, and feeds suspicions that our aim is to steal Iraqi oil and retain military bases.

In a poll in September by the International Republican Institute, 42 percent of Iraqis said the country was headed in the wrong direction (more than double the proportion who said so in April), compared with 43 percent who said it was going in the right direction. And the two biggest reasons for pessimism were insecurity and the foreign occupation.
[...]
So Mr. Bush's grim insistence on staying the course indefinitely, and his refusal to renounce unequivocally any interest in U.S. bases, reflects the same mistake he has made all along: a failure to appreciate the vigor of Iraqi nationalism. And now we're caught in a trap. We can't pull out, but by hunkering down indefinitely we help fuel the insecurity that keeps us in Iraq.

Check back on Tuesday--same Kristof time, same Kristoff channel.

[UPDATE - 8:40pm, PST, 14 Nov] Check out the sequel to this Kristof column, freshly posted on Monday