"Staring into the abyss"

Hilzoy has written a clear-eyed and heart-rending essay on the consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. It must be read.

Obviously, both Crocker and the Iraqi foreign minister have an interest in making the consequences of a US withdrawal from Iraq sound as bad as possible. But that doesn't mean that they aren't right. More below the fold.

There is an understandable temptation for people who advocate withdrawal to say that if we withdraw, things won't be so bad. Since I do not have the gift of second sight, I cannot say that they are wrong. But I think they are, and I think it's important for those of us who advocate withdrawal to be clear about that, and to base our arguments not on the thought that withdrawal will make things better, but on some basis that's more likely to stand the test of time.

I think it's almost inevitable that a full-blown civil war will break out once we leave, and that it will be very, very, very bad. I think it's pretty likely that the Iraqi army will splinter, or at least be seriously weakened by defections, and that the training we have been providing will be put at the service of the militias. I'm not nearly as clear that al Qaeda in Iraq will take over Anbar -- the Sunnis seem to have decided that they don't care much for AQI, and will presumably resist their influence. Iran will certainly continue to interfere, although it may have a greater interest in promoting stability once we leave, since promoting instability will no longer be a way of keeping us tied down. Turkey could invade the Kurdish region; they are furious that the Iraqi Kurds are allowing the PKK to operate from the Kurdish areas, and that we have not forced them to kick the PKK out. Turkey is already amassing forces on the border, and may not wait for us to leave before invading. I hope the countries in the region are thinking now about how to avoid a regional war; I suspect the greatest danger is that they will try some limited interventions that will spiral into a regional war even though no party wants it to. Wars are not manageable or predictable, and any supposedly "limited" intervention by Iraq's neighbors seems to me to run a serious risk of starting a general conflagration.

In short, I think that once we leave, all hell will break loose, and that a lot of the most horrifying predictions about what will happen in the event of a withdrawal stand a decent chance of coming true.

And yet I still think we should withdraw. The easiest way to explain this would be to note, first, that we don't have much choice, since we are on the verge of breaking our army as it is; and second, that our presence doesn't seem to have helped much so far. But the real reason is that I think that our presence only delays the inevitable.

I agree with most, if not all, of her conclusions (as well as many of the excellent commenters). But the larger point is that those of us who see nothing good coming out of our on-going presence in Iraq must also be conscious of and honest about the fact that nothing good is likely to come of our leaving, either, at least in the near term.

We must be aware of and honest about the consequences of what we're advocating. Exactly as the advocates of invading Iraq never were and still aren't now. And we should be planning for it -- again, something the war advocates refused to do -- such as funding for the massive refugee problem that is alaready causing disruptions in Syria and Lebanon and are sure to only get worse.