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The blogless life was going okay for Matt Yglesias until he ran across the Pollack, O'Hanlon, and Biddle op-ed from Foreign Affairs and got on Gchat:
10:51someone needs to note the illogic in this from O'Hanlon and Pollack:"It is worth noting that separation resulting from sectarian cleansing was not the chief cause of the reduction in violence, as some have claimed. Much of Iraq remains intermingled but increasingly peaceful. And whereas a cleansing argument implies that casualties should have gone down in Baghdad, for example, as mixed neighborhoods were cleansed, casualties actually went up consistently during the sectarian warfare of 2006. Cleansing may have reduced the violence somewhat in some places, but it was not the main cause."10:52OF COURSE VIOLENCE WENT UP DURING THE CLEANSING10:52!!!!!!10:52the ethnic cleansing consists of violence!That guy should get a blog. Possibly at the Center for American Progress. What's also weird about the Biddle/O'Hanlon/Pollack article is that the rationale for withdrawal has now flipped. So long as things are going well, they say, American has to sustain its presence, even if it slowly reduces its troop density. But "if an electoral crisis or some other event returns Iraq to civil war, it would be very hard to justify another troop surge to try to stabilize Iraq. Containment -- withdrawing all U.S. troops while working to prevent the chaos in Iraq from spilling over to the rest of the region -- would then become the United States' only realistic option." In other words, a few years ago, when everything was going badly, we couldn't leave because Iraq would collapse into chaos. Now we can only leave if Iraq collapses into chaos, but have to hang around in order to cement its gains. There's sort of a heads-we-stay, tails-we-never-leave thing going on. It would really be preferable if folks just came out with the underlying theory and simply said, as John McCain has, that we owe Iraq a troop presence in perpetuity, and that full withdrawal simply shouldn't be on the table at all.
