Withdrawing from Iraq

The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan makes one of the more cogent arguments I have seen about the pitfalls of withdrawal from Iraq. One of the interesting arguments he presents is that self-proclaimed liberals who advocate withdrawal are hypocrites. He puts it more nicely than that, but that's his basic point. In the context of foreign policy, liberals believe that values other than simple security interests should govern affairs with other states (values about human rights, promotion of democracy, just war theory, promotion of social welfare, etc.). Withdrawal from Iraq before Iraqi forces are prepared to provide domestic security and before the Iraqi government is fully functional would be an abandonment of those liberal principles.

Here's the beginning of Kaplan's article:

Of all the lines of argument President Bush has used to rally the public behind the war in Iraq, few have elicited more howls of derision than his latest. "If you think it's bad now," he said at a recent press conference, "imagine what Iraq would look like if the United States leaves before this government can defend itself." To which a headline in The Washington Post offered this typical response: "bush's new argument: it could be worse."

Whatever its political uses, Bush's new argument happens to be true. Yet the moral cost of abandoning a country we have turned inside-out seems not to have made the slightest impression on opinion-makers. To the extent that ethical considerations factor into the debate at all, it's usually in favor of a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. Mostly, though, the debate over leaving has been conducted in the sterile language of geopolitics, credibility, and "misallocated" resources.

This heartlessness of the withdrawal argument responds to multiple needs that are largely unrelated to Iraq. It comforts the sensibilities of opinion-makers who have a distaste for this administration's foreign policy and so don't seem to feel much stake in its human consequences. It testifies to the consistency of those who, having opposed sending U.S. forces to Iraq in the first place, see nothing problematic about pulling them out today. And it offers assurance that, but for the bungled U.S. occupation, Iraq can only be better off. No one has espoused this last view more vigorously than Democratic Representative John Murtha. His summary of the situation in Iraq amounts to this: We are the problem.

Facts on the ground suggest Murtha has things exactly backward.