Bush appointee opposes withdrawal

I know, weird, right?

This part's actually bizarre:

On the potential for worsening violence after an American withdrawal from Iraq, [Ambassador Ryan Crocker] said: “You have to look at what the consequences would be, and you look at those who say we could have bases elsewhere in the country. Well yes, we could, but we would have the prospect of American forces looking on while civilians by the thousands were slaughtered. Not a pretty prospect.

What American forces are doing as we speak, you'll note, is looking on while civilians by the thousands are slaughtered. They're just looking on from very close range. And shooting back. And getting shot. His is an answer to a question more like "would withdrawing make you feel helpless?" which wasn't actually asked. The question, rather, is, Will the violence worsen after an American withdrawal? Quite possibly. Or, more specifically, it might very well intensify. So, if he prefers, this comes down to, for now, a choice between a slow bleed that costs American soldiers their lives, or a faster one, with a similar casualty total, that spares coalition soldiers. That choice is a painful one, but his rationale for choosing the former should be stronger than simply a desire to heed his own concerns about seeming powerless.

 

Comments

[Machiara]

Because you can't have a "real" blog without a foil/troll/Washington Wizards to your Harlem Globetrotters, right?

Ahem. I think you're setting up a false dilemma here, Brian. You give two options:

a) We stay. X Iraqis and Y Americans die.

b) We leave. X Iraqis die (just more quickly) and 0 Americans die.

If these really were the only two options, I think everyone would support an immediate pullout. But just because some Iraqis are dying while we have a military presence there doesn't mean that if we leave things won't get much, much worse, for example:

c) We leave. 100X Iraqis die and 0 Americans die.

And then we factor in whether our retreat from Iraq (and so it would be protrayed amongst your more violent sects of Muslims, and probably in the larger world media as well) might embolden them to attack Americans elsewhere and give them a base from which to operate. Then we might be facing:

d) We leave. 100X Iraqis die and Z Americans die.

Maybe Z is orders of magnitude more than Y. Maybe it's less. Who knows?

The upshot is, we have a fairly stable situation in Iraq, as these things go. Yes, there are casualties, but they are relatively low. We now have something of a responsibility to the Iraqi people to not leave them in a state of chaos and genocide. We also owe it to ourselves not to destabilize a region already seething with violence.

Maybe leaving is the right move. But you're going to have to have more than an a priori assumption that there will be "a similar casualty total" either way.

[Brian]

Well, sort of, right? Because we can't actually say for sure what's going to happen no matter what we do, the permutations here are endless. But reasonable people can whittle them down to a few reasonable options. So option C is out, because 100X Iraqis would be something like three million Iraqis a year--an unprecedented kill rate, especially when the violence is as peppered as it is. For the same reason, D is out. D is out for two reasons unless you qualify Z better. Thinking extremely causally, it would be almost unthinkable that Z would be anything but much, much smaller than Y.

The best way to do this is to look at civilian casualty rates in areas with big American presences and in areas without. There are differences. But not so great (and not so clearly sustainable) that it makes sense to me to stick around indefinitely, or to present the option as anything much different than I did.