Even TNR sometimes has something right sometimes...

[zsquirrelboy]

This is absolutely correct:

Comments

[crouchback]

While I do think we'd better do something for the Iraqis who worked with us, I have some reservations.

Given the amount of infiltration of Iraqi security forces by Islamic extremists, liberally issuing visas means we'll end up with people coming to the US as refugees who are tied in with al-Qaida.

The problem is, they are only going to be a fraction. But if we have the same problems with them that we had with the last major crop of Iraqi refugees, they will be a very influential fraction. (They did a terrible job with the post-Desert Storm Iraqi refugees.)

They'll have to do a careful job to help people out without causing a security problem here. My current confidence in the ability of the State Department, US Military and Department of Homeland Security to do a careful job is pretty low.

[zsquirrelboy]

You're right, of course. I've added to the post a bit.

big picture, greater good (or bad)

[loravarnion]

I understand the feeling that we need to do something for the Iraqis that we've put in harm's way as "collaborators" if we pull out, but given that 40-50 bodies are discovered on Baghdad's streets every morning these days, I don't think issuing a few hundred visas will really make a dent in our moral obligation

[lhn]

So, given the foreseeable outcome of withdrawal-- the death toll goes up, at least in the short run, as the internal Iraqi conflict heats up and then perhaps further when whoever gets on top (if anyone) engages in some vengeful ethnoreligious cleansing with the machinery of a state behind them (cf. Saddam's own mass murders)-- do you think withdrawal is the right thing to do

[zsquirrelboy]

We're there and we aren't stopping the violence. I don't think we can.

Withdrawal is inevitable. We're not going to start a draft. Absent a draft there is no way we can produce the number of soldiers required to create any kind of order there. The only question is what the circumstances of our withdrawal will be.

I'd love to be wrong about this, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that I am.

[lhn]

Withdrawal is inevitable.That's clearly not true. The United States can choose to withdraw, or it can choose not to. The loss of eight hundred soldiers a year may be a better or a worse choice for us than the consequences of a withdrawal. It kills our soldiers, and injures many more, and that's something that should never be asked without reason. It may be more than the people of the US are willing to pay, or than it should be asked to. But it's not, in itself, an existential threat to the US military

[cruiser]

Absent a draft there is no way we can produce the number of soldiers required to create any kind of order there.Actually, we've got the number of soldiers required, we're just not deploying them in the manner required to do the job. When press coverage makes noise about the first unit to deploy a 3rd time to Iraq, it really drives home how we're not doing this the way it should be done. When we sent folks over to fight WWII, we didn't say "OK, you're going for a year, then you get a year home with your family, then we'll send you for another year" - we sent them over for the duration. What we're doing is saying "OK, go spend a year there, get a bunch of knowledge about how things operate, learn what works, learn what doesn't, build relationships with the locals, then come back for a year, forget everything you learned and when we send you back, it will be to a different location so much of your previous learning doesn't apply." Oh, and while we're at it, since we're going to let folks come home for a year at a time, it means we