I've been fairly skeptical of the "get out of Iraq now" crowd. While I strongly sympathize with those who oppose the war in Iraq, I think this position has been very badly thought out. In my own experience, very few people who support a withdrawal that I've talked to, or read, have made a good argument for why pulling our troops out would make the situation better, and not worse.

Juan Cole, however, writing in The Nation, makes one of the first strong cases that I've read for why the United States should withdraw from Iraq. The crux of his argument is that the repression and marginalization of the Sunnis by American forces has allowed the Kurds and the Shiites to resist compromise, leading to an escalation of sectarian tensions and violence. If the US were to withdraw, he argues, the Shiites and the Kurds would be forced to sit down with the Sunnis (perhaps out of the fear that, without US protection, Sunni attacks against Shia and Kurdish targets would dramatically increase) and work out a political solution. In his own words:

QUOTE
The US repression of Sunnis has allowed Shiites and Kurds to avoid compromise. The Sunnis in Parliament have demanded that the excesses of de-Baathification be reversed (thousands of Sunnis have been fired from jobs just because they belonged to the Baath Party). They have been rebuffed. Sunnis rejected the formation of a Shiite super-province in the south. Shiites nevertheless pushed it through Parliament. The Kurdish leadership has also dismissed Sunni objections to their plans to annex the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, which has a significant Arab population.

The key to preventing an intensified civil war is US withdrawal from the equation so as to force the parties to an accommodation. Therefore, the United States should announce its intention to withdraw its military forces from Iraq, which will bring Sunnis to the negotiating table and put pressure on Kurds and Shiites to seek a compromise with them.


I'm still digesting his argument here, but my initial reaction is that Cole may be on to something. As always when it comes to Iraq, (and Cole points this out on his blog) it is far from clear that this plan would go as smoothly on the ground as it looks on paper, but this type of negotiated-withdrawal that he advocates may be the best option we have.

LINK