By Ezra
Brad Plumer, in answer to last week's question du jour, makes a fairly convincing case against timed withdrawal. Read it. It remains my position, though, that there's a softer form withdrawal can take, one that I think would carry most of its assumed benefits and few of a timetable's weaknesses. If we publicly disavowed bases, loudly proclaimed our intention to leave as soon as the Iraqi government and security forces was complete, and created a timed drawdown in troop strength, much of what we want withdrawal to prove might actually get across without a full abandonment of the project.
We should, at this point, have a general idea of how quickly the Iraqi army is coming online. If we tagged the withdrawal of the first, say, 10,000 troops to the date when we thought there'd be 20,000 (or whatever) Iraqi troops to replace them, we could create the symbolic first step towards withdrawal without seriously losing troop strength in the country. If we then kept doing that, bit by bit, we could gradually disengage,, though do it in a flexible way that leaves us able to recommit if the situation begins to worsen. In any case, it seems clear that we need to convince both average Iraqis and a certain subsection of insurgents that we don't have long-term, imperialist designs on the country, and the sooner we do that, the better things get.
On another note, whatever happened to Moqtada al-Sadr? I haven't heard much about him lately.
