LEAVING THEM ALONE. Yglesias and Rich Lowry are debating (sort of) whether leaving Sunni militias to fight al-Qaeda on their own is a plausible strategy. I'm very much on Matt's side on this, in no small part because I think that the Anbar experience over the last year shows that the Sunnis can, if they want, deal quite capably with al-Qaeda with minimal U.S. support. Indeed, I think that the burden of evidence lies very heavily on Lowry if he wants to argue that a small group of terrorists can enter a hostile country and take over against the will of the locals. In a post-withdrawal Iraq, we now have good reason to believe that the Sunnis, to say nothing of the Shiites, won't be receptive to al-Qaeda. More importantly, while it's difficult at this point to envision the precise details of how a withdrawal will go down, I very much doubt that it will involve the sudden cutting of contacts between Iraq and the United States. The U.S. will continue to support allies (whomever they may be) with equipment, training, political support, and so forth. As the size and profile of the Occupation dwindles, al-Qaeda will become easier, rather than harder, to fight. Civil strife between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites is a different, more intractable problem, but I'm nevertheless reluctant to concede the post-withdrawal chaos narrative that war supporters have been pushing for a while. If the U.S. doesn't begin to withdraw, however, I'd bet very heavily that the weapons we're now giving to Sunni forces will soon be used against U.S. troops.
--Robert Farley
