From Daily Kos here is one view of what is going to happen with the United State's involvement in Iraq. It is not a pretty outlook.
Iraq's Endgame
Fri Mar 02, 2007 at 11:53:41 AM PST
Let me offer some grim predictions as to the outcome of American involvement in Iraq:
1) There are going to be American troops in Iraq for the next ten years, though the numbers will be substantially reduced.
2) There are going to be permanent American bases in Iraq, just as the neoconservatives had desired.
3) Iraq is going to continue to be in a period of instability for years, and become a true haven for terrorism and religious strife, and there is very little we can do about it.
This is roughly the premise of the "fortified retreat" scenario proposed by many as the closest possible thing to victory, and similar to what the Iraq Study Group itself had proposed. The only variations are in the relative magnitudes.
Note that by most estimates, this would seem to average out to be the best remotely likely scenario. All the other likely outcomes, like ethnic cleansing, a civil war leading to partitioning, or the rise of a religious dictatorship, are monstrously worse.
Thus we are stuck, above, with the worst possible outcome... except for all the others.
To this day -- to this very day -- I would support leaving American forces in Iraq if there were any credible possibility of stabilizing the country. I was bitterly against the very premise of the invasion, and have written previously about the decades of damage the Bush administration has done via this unconscionable fiasco. But America made this mess, and America bears responsibility for the bloody aftermath -- whatever that aftermath turns out to be. If leaving the current troop levels in place could truly prevent another 100,000 Iraqi deaths, then it would be our duty to do it. If Petraeus' plan had a reasonable chance of working, it would be our obligation to try. A miserable truth, yes, but a moral truth nonetheless.
Because some of the possible outcomes, here -- civil war, genocide, religious radicalization leading to possible regional war -- are nearly unthinkable and yet, thanks to the bungling, almost incomprehensible incompetence of the Bush administration, we're thinking them. The odds continue to be extremely high that one of those worst case scenarios -- and you know you are truly and deeply sunk when there are multiple worst case scenarios vying for prominence -- may indeed happen.
The simple fact is that victory (however that would be defined) is not among our achievable options -- and there is liittle hope even of maintaining the current slowly degrading near-stalemate. There are not enough forces, and there are not going to be enough forces. Period. End of sentence: end of war. President Bush will never order into the country the massive numbers of troops necessary to truly secure it, nor will any other president, nor are those troops even available to be sent, under the best of cases. It won't happen.
The war was therefore lost the moment the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld plan was put into place, sending a bare minimum of troops thudding around Iraq like ping pong balls, able to take any patch of ground, but never able to stay long enough for it to stay taken or to prevent retaliations after they left. That was precisely what many military strategists warned against: those warnings went ignored, under the neoconservative premise that... well, scratch that. I have no idea what neoconservative "premise" managed to bungle every conceivable aspect of the war. It's time we stopped calling it a "premise", even. Call it something else: a self-confidence scam, perhaps.
The sad truth is, however, that after these years of war, the foundations of post-war Iraq have already been laid. Barring surprises -- and only negative surprises are likely, despite the Bush administration policy of presuming positive surprises at every turn and then ignoring their gaping absence -- the best case scenario is a slow bleed if we stay, and a slow bleed if we go.
Despite many, many predictions to the contrary by most others, I suspect the odds of a complete troop withdrawal from the country to be vanishingly small. A withdrawal from combat, quite probable: a redeployment "across the horizon" of most of the major fighting, absolutely.
But a Vietnam-style abandonment of the country seems extraordinarily unlikely. American forces may retreat to fortified bases in the country and leave most day to day operations to the Iraqis, but I find it hard to conceive that any president, Republican or Democrat, would abandon the already-built major bases in an extremely turbulent portion of the world threatening at constant collapse, unless circumstances crumbled so badly that even those positions became utterly untenable.
It would require a metaphorical abandonment of the country: impossible for this president, unlikely for others. It would require a physical abandonment of the country: equally unlikely. It would require a reshaping of Mideast policy such that those bases, located in the middle of a region of unstable nations, were considered less liability than strategic advantage: absurdly unlikely, regardless of whatever future American policy morphs into.
It is certainly possible to envision a near-term Iraq without those bases, but it is far from the most likely outcome. In fact, it may not even be the preferred outcome: troop withdrawals from combat areas in order to let Iraqi forces sink or swim on their own may still need to be positioned close in to deter or respond to potential catastrophic circumstances, such as collapse into Darfur-like religious genocides, or the potential large-scale Iranian involvement in Iraq that the Bush administration intends to work us into apoplexy over, but which could indeed be possible in the absolute absence of any U.S. deterrent.
On these predictions and guesses, I may well be in the distinct minority, on this site and most others. That's fine: they're predictions and guesses. On the likelihood of at least several semipermanent bases remaining there regardless of which plan is undertaken, I am undoubtedly in the minority. But I don't think I'm wrong.
Though it may seem that the debate on Iraq goes in circles, the shift in the last six months has been dramatic and declarative. The Bush administration is being widely challenged on the obvious absurdities of their own "plans", and the Democrats are being forced into the leadership on Iraq in the face of Republican and administration "planning" that consists of nothing more than pounding on the tables, even at this late date demanding deference to fictitious strategies and utterly discredited assertions. I'm hardly surprised that it is taking longer than six weeks to recast a quagmire into something else. And frankly, I won't be surprised if the resulting outcome looks more like a slow trot out of town than a gallup -- it may very well be the case that a slow trot is better, if there is a reasonable expectation that it can help deter a worst case scenario.
In the media and in government, there are now precious few people still making the case that winning is possible. The entire debate is now targeted around the best presumed outcome: controlled losing. That's what the Iraq Study Group proposed; that's what the (several) Murtha plans have proposed; that's even what the military itself has been preparing for, presuming a miracle is not forthcoming. Controlled losing is sadly, at this point, the apparent best case scenario -- and even that is tenuous. If we're lucky, we might pull it off. If we're not, Iraq gets much, much worse.
In the face of an administration that seems to pride itself on being more out of touch with reality with each passing month, the Murtha plan seems the best shot. There may be others, but it seems clear that the Bush administration is no more competent in the execution of their favored war today than they were on the day it started, and constraints must therefore be placed on their abilities to continue it.
Short version: this is a situation that is impossible to win. Having Democrats in charge doesn't change that, and the answers on how to fail the least catastrophically are not easy. That is, after all, the definition of quagmire.
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