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Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, and the author of Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America contends that, "Thanks to his meticulous planning and foresight, Saddam's lieutenants are now running the Iraqi resistance and the US's best option is to withdraw now..."
Regardless of the number of troops the United States puts on the ground or how long they stay there, Allawi's government is doomed to fail. The more it fails, the more it will have to rely on the United States to prop it up. The more the United States props up Allawi, the more discredited he will become in the eyes of the Iraqi people -- all of which creates yet more opportunities for the Iraqi resistance to exploit.
We will suffer a decade-long nightmare that will lead to the deaths of thousands more Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. We will witness the creation of a viable and dangerous anti-American movement in Iraq that will one day watch as American troops unilaterally withdraw from Iraq every bit as ignominiously as Israel did from Lebanon.
The calculus is quite simple: the sooner we bring our forces home, the weaker this movement will be. And, of course, the obverse is true: the longer we stay, the stronger and more enduring this byproduct of Bush's elective war on Iraq will be.
There is no elegant solution to our Iraqi debacle. It is no longer a question of winning but rather of mitigating defeat.
[via metafilter]
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