Oh, please. The same idiots who argued for getting us into this untenable Iraq position, and then for the last four years, enabling this untenable position to morph into an even more untenable position are now accusing Barack Obama of "greenlighting genocide?" Our Iraq options have gone from awful to way beyond awful and now we're pointing fingers at...Barack Obama? Please get a grip. Options? We HAVE no stinking options!

I am seriously beginning to get the impression that certain quarters are not taking this seriously at all...

To clarify: I'll take clowns like J. Goldberg a little more seriously when they begin to grok that it's over Johnny, that it's way past time for grownups to discuss what post-American occupied Iraq ought to look like. As in the Pentagon says that a military solution to our "Iraq problem" is gone with the desert wind, and so is the idea of an Iraqi central government... That leaves us with what - the Biden Plan? The Biden Plan is basically the Leslie Gelb plan circa 2004 for a partitioned Iraq that Saudi Arabia and Turkey used to claim would be more or less a precursor to WWIII. Ideas? Any ideas?

Oy vey.

"At the very least, we must offer asylum and safe passage out of Iraq to all those who are at personal risk for having stood beside us to bring democracy to Iraq."

And about that...

Our Iraq options have gone from awful to way beyond awful and now we're pointing fingers at...Barack Obama?

No. Goldberg is contrasting Obama's choice with that of Bill Clinton and the "liberals" of the 1990s. Goldberg holds the United States, not Barack Obama, (partially) responsible for the possible consequences of withdrawal. Goldberg wrote,

"It’s worth pointing out a key difference between the potential genocide in Iraq and the heart-wrenching slaughters in Congo and Sudan: The latter aren’t our fault. But if genocide unfolds in Iraq after American troops depart, it would be hard to argue that we weren’t at least partly to blame."

He then observes, correctly, that Obama is in favor of that withdrawal. So no, Goldberg does not blame Obama for the options that we have in Iraq. He expresses amusement at Obama's choice between our options (and the fact that Obama supports that same choice between the options in Congo and Sudan).

Balta,

Yeah, the State Department should be doing all it possibly can to admit Iraqi refugees into the United States. However, I was speaking specifically about tribal leaders, government officials, and others who may be singled out for retribution. I'm guessing that the 4,000 refugees who will be considered by September are a broader group of mostly private citizens.

The discussion was about genocide, not about what, or who, got the United States of America involved in the Iraq mess. It is a mess. We need an exit strategy, agreed. Stop laying blame and suggest something.

Hush. The Verb.

Obama, as Curtis says, rhymes with Osama, has no experience. With anything. You can postulate all you like, JohnS, the Dems have no experience with the rest of the world.

Why don't you keep to the KOS.

JohnS, as usual, you postulate the liberal cause. We know your act, it's old. You need to give us a reason to believe. doh

That must be a different Karl.

Liberal interventionists do not claim that we are obligated under all circumstances to intervene in sectarian conflicts - only that we ought to do so when we can and if it would be helpful to do so; and only in instances of supreme emergency, such as when genocide is actually taking place; finally, liberal interventionists favor multilateral approaches to such interventions, so that no single power is forced to carry the weight of the intervention and bear all the costs.

Also, Goldberg is mischaracterizing Senator Obama's position:

“Nobody is proposing we leave precipitously. There are still going to be U.S. forces in the region that could intercede, with an international force, on an emergency basis,” Obama said between stops on the first of two days scheduled on the New Hampshire campaign trail. “There’s no doubt there are risks of increased bloodshed in Iraq without a continuing U.S. presence there.”

Isn't Sen. Obama merely expressing a growing consensus? That we need to leave Iraq because our forces may be inflaming the situation, and that the Iraqi government is corrupt and incompetant, and that the costs of staying outweight the costs of leaving, but that in leaving Iraq we must do so gradually and not precipitously?

(Don't worry, Karl -- any regular reader could tell that wasn't you!)

Chuck is right on the money in terms of diagnosing two of Goldberg's main bits of willful ignorance: ignoring the question of costs and capabilities, and ignoring the fact that almost all of the real proposals being made involve a staged withdrawl (since, among other things, that's the only kind of militarily practical kind of withdrawl there is). See, e.g.,
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_07/011714.php

I would note another, perhaps more subtle form of sophistry in Goldberg's article: the slide from the claim that the US withdrawl would play some sort of causal role or other ("responsible at least in part"); to the less-refined claim that our withdraw would cause the ; to the further claim that advocates of the withdrawl are advocating genocide as instrumental to the withdrawl. The first of these is the plausible one, but it is not terribly morally problematic. The latter two sound morally just awful, and they are -- but they are also utterly false. The sentence "X plays a causal role in Y" and "X causes Y" are simply not synonymous. And doing X, where Y will result as a consequence, is not the same as doing Y in order to do X. (Your buying the Harry Potter book resulted in your not sending that money to relieving African famine; it does not follow that you killed some Africans in order to read the Harry Potter book.)

Just more evidence for the thesis that everything that Goldberg provides gives good reason to not read anything else he writes.

Abrupt withdrawls? Why waste the space. Any prudent withdrawl/repositioning of US military forces from Iraq would be a huge undertaking requiring carefully detailed planning (done in advance, not on the fly), and the withdrawl itself would take MANY months, especially considering the hostile conditions.

As for genocide, I seriously doubt that Saudi Arabia would stand idly by as thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi Sunnis were slaughtered by Shiites. Or that Shiite Iran would welcome the threat of a military showdown with an alliance of its Sunni neighbors that would certainly come if this supposed genocide that keeps J. Goldberg awake at nite were ever to occur. Those two regional powers would work very hard to see that genocide doesn't happen in Iraq, if only for their own internal stability.

What will likely happen is more of the same ethnic cleansing, as targeted violence continues to encourage mixed regions to become less so, forcing Sunnis and Shiites to gravitate towards their own, while the Kurds continue to jealously protect their turf. (side note: Of course, by supplying weapons to the Sunni tribesmen in Anbar province to proxy fight al-Qaeda there for us, we are also contributing to the continued Sunni-Shia violence/ethnic cleansing.)

I would say there is less chance of Darfur-style genocide in Iraq than there is to an eventual military showdown between our Iraq ally Kurdistan, and our NATO ally Turkey. Hopefully, our next president isn't planning to reposition U.S. troops anywhere near, say, Kirkuk. Now THAT would be a sticky situation. But then that of course, doesn't provide any Goldbergian excuses/rationalizations for us to continue to occupy a country that no longer wants us there.

For clarity sake, I should have written:

But then, writing about real-world stuff like that, of course, doesn't provide any Goldbergian excuses/rationalizations for us to continue to occupy a country that no longer wants us there.

According to Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Iraqi national government is gossamer, but subgroups are solid. They are in an intensifying melee that has "genocidal stakes." Biddle goes on to say that "the downside risks" for any group that is party to a power-sharing deal include extermination by mass violence from rival groups.
With Obama's withdrawal,can we credibly promise protection commensurate with that risk?

Biddle also says that our only options in Iraq are either surge or withdrawl, and characterizes the surge as a "longshot gamble." That's likely because according to the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual (co-authored by Gen. Petraeus), a “minimum troop density” of 20 combat troops per 1,000 people is required to stabilize a given area. Baghdad has a population of 6 million. Do the math, that's 120,000 combat troops required for Baghdad alone. The simple fact is, we don't have the numbers of troops required to stabilize the entire country. All we can hope to achieve at our current levels is more of the same. As Biddle puts it: "The American combat presence in Iraq is insufficient to end the violence but does cap its intensity."

Again, it's over. All we can do at this point is make plans for withdrawl, and make plans for what a post-occupation looks like - and I don't mean unilateral plans.

JohnS, Re: genocide in Kurdistan by the Turks

What do you think of Peter Galbraith's piece in the New York Review of Books? Basically, withdraw from Iraq and let Kurdistan declare independence, and maintain a US presence there.

Chuck,

I thought Galbraith painted a vivid portrait of the current Iraq state of affairs, but I think his way forward would be a huge mistake. We don't want to put ourselves in the position of having to choose sides in that conflict (Turkey/Kurdistan)...

So in other words, a "longshot gamble" beats certain genocide.

You keep saying it's over. As Ronald Reagan wrote in his diaries, sometimes I think you ("you" being the lefties) hope for the other side to win.

“minimum troop density” of 20 combat troops per 1,000 people is required to stabilize a given area.

Iraq's non-Kurd population is about 21 million. That equates to a need, nationwide, of nearly a half-million troops (minimum) -- just for stabilization.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting a little tired of being scolded by the neocons that I, and the Iraqi people, are responsible for cleaning up the mess they, the neocons, made.

And I'm beyond tired, I'm furious that the people who made this mess dare to call me "genocidal" just because I'm not willing to accept their colossally bad advice, any more.

You toss the word "neocon" around like a frisbee. Were all the Dems who voted for authorizing the commander-in-chief to dismantle a perceived threat just puppies chasing that flying saucer?

Yes.

Honesty is the best policy. I congratulate you.

Congratulations for honesty are generally worth little coming from anonymous posters. The Democrats who voted to authorize the war were worse than puppies because most of them had to know Iraq posed only a minimal threat to American interests. They voted for the war to support a hawkish policy by a popular president at a time when the electorate was hawkish. They weren't chasing UFOs, they were chasing votes.

Chuck, it's a name. Anonymous. It's no more significant than "Chuck". Would you prefer I use a name, say, Hillary? Bill? Monica?

People here use names. Deal with it. At least I post my email.

"Congratulations for honesty are generally worth little coming from anonymous posters"

Chuck, are you really a Purdue educator? It's a nickname. It could be Sally. sheesh

"You keep saying it's over. As Ronald Reagan wrote in his diaries, sometimes I think you ("you" being the lefties) hope for the other side to win."

This sounds like there is an inference to be drawn from someone's pessimism about the state of the war, to what there preferences are about the war's outcome. But that is an utter & total non-sequitur. There is no legitimate inference to be drawn from someone's thinking, in the presence of rather significant evidence, that this war is a lost cause; to their hoping that we lose the war and/or rooting for the other side. Indeed, by this twisted form of reasoning, it would be impossible for loyal citizens ever to recognize that we had lost a war! Thank goodness that, e.g., the Japanese didn't endorse such moronic logic in 1945 -- it would have been very costly for both them and us.

Having said that, I do think we need to distinguish between "can't win the war" and "can't win the war, given existing political parameters". I don't think that we can't win this war simpliciter, but to win it, we'd need vastly more troops than we have available, and the citizenry is simply not going to be willing to sustain the requisite draft to get them. (Whether or not they are correct in this attitude is a separate question.) But, given the resources that we, as a nation, might be willing to commit, I think the evidence is pretty strong that we're just pissing in the ocean at this point.

And this bit is even worse: "a "longshot gamble" beats certain genocide". (I think that Anonymous is endorsing this line, though the post in question is a bit confusing -- there's a "So" that doesn't seem connected to anything.) This is exactly to miss Chuck's initial point, that costs & capabilities _matter_. A longshot gamble could only automatically beat certain genocide if you have, quite literally, nothing better to do with the lives & money that you would lose; and if the gamble doesn't include possible losing situations that leave things much, much worse than the genocide. For example (just to make up some numbers to demonstrate the principle), suppose that staying 'surged' indefinitely leads to a 2% chance of preventing the genocide -- but also has a 1% chance of our getting drawn into a major military confrontation with Iran, in which a great many people will die, and our political position in the Muslim world goes down even further, there's an oil price spike that triggers a world recession, and the genocide still happens anyway. Then it might be that there's still a pretty negative expected utility for this particular bet. So, in the end, there's no getting around questions of what can we reasonably expect to be able to accomplish in any given choice, and what the possible downsides we'd be risking in doing so, and what the opportunity costs would be.

(I'm also not so sure that genocide -- as opposed to, say, an all-out civil war, with much ethnic killing, but not genocide per se (because each side is able to keep enough of its territory intact) -- is any more likely than the likely pointlessness of an open-ended long-term military commitment to Iraq; but that is a separate question.)

Good News? Glimmer of Hope?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin