Think Long And Hard

Muslim prayer rug hung up in concertina wire

I listened carefully to President Bush’s speech yesterday, as did everyone else in the bureau. While he mentioned it several times I don’t think that the President communicated very well the foreseen results of the inevitable U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq.

When the United States soon leaves Iraq this country will cease to exist. The government will fold almost immediately and a sectarian war will ignite claiming hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives over the next decade. This is something that almost everyone that I’ve met in Iraq agrees upon wholeheartedly regardless of where they stand on the current struggle.

Sectarian warlords sponsored by Iraq’s so-called neighbors will carve up Iraq and biblical scale genocide will ensue. The West will have squandered its last, best hope of achieving some modicum of stability in the region.

At home thhe American public will politically bury its head in the sands of isolationism and pray to God that the violence does not come to the United States. It will come; and come and come and there will be nothing that any government agency can do about it. Jack Bauer does not exist, and the septic violence will spill out from the Middle East and flow right into the heart of the United States and its allies.

To return to the Middle East and aggressively root out the cancer of radical Islam e.g., terrorism will take an exponentially larger military force a much, much longer time and cost tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of U.S. lives.

Americans might want to think long and hard about banging the politically popular tambourine of “withdrawal at all cost”. There will be a cost; and it will be globally catastrophic.