by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
This is one of those "Still True Today" things where plenty of blog posts have been written, but it deserves repeating: asking withdrawal supporters, as Matt Bai did to Bill Richardson, "What about the genocide that will follow American withdrawal from Iraq", is what Mitt Romney might call a "null set". Political support for daily US casualties cannot continue indefinitely. At some point in the future, and probably within the next decade, US troops will either leave Iraq, or at the least scale back their day-to-day peacekeeping actions; there is no precedent for having an occupying force endlessly conduct regular patrols in a foreign land. At that point, given the current level of ethnic strife and civil unrest in Iraq, the level of violence will increase whether it occurs six months from now or sixteen years from now. The burden needs to be on occupation supporters to explain how they will reduce the level of violence while grinding through US military equipment and personnel. Otherwise, we're just postponing the inveitable, and at an enormous cost, and we would be better off negotiating away as much violence as possible while withdrawing.
All of this, of course, takes as a given the idea that a US withdrawal is certain lead to genocide, something that hasn't received any real scrutiny and might not hold up under closer examination.
Since one of the refrains from print journalists is that the blogosphere gets too "personal", and I can empathize with that, let me say that none of this carping is really Matt Bai-specific; the "withdrawal will lead to genocide and it will be America's fault" frame of reporting about Iraq has dominated the Beltway discourse since at least 2005.
—Signed, not Ezra Klein, dagnabbit
