Pre-surge our choices in Iraq were to leave a bloodbath of our instigation or stay for as long as we could stomach the lower human and higher financial cost of occupation. A strategy that has given us a chance to leave a functioning polity (ies) in place, able to hold its own in a region that might eventually adopt an ethos and the structures of mutual security can't be judged anything but a success compared with that alternative.

With a name like O'Tool you should know that the price of Occupation is the curse of Empire that will dog your children's children and theirs!

It sounds to me like what you are saying is; "if we leave Iraq, we/America are screwed and if we stay, we/America are screwed".

So I see the tough decision that needs to be made on Iraq is whether we stay or leave and ' Which "screwing" is actually worse for America ? '

In a sense; there is more cost and pain down the road in any event. The invasion, and especially the way it was executed, however only left us with horrible choices. The surge has created the possibility of a sustainable Iraq, whereas before the surge, we were headed in the opposite direction, were we not?

I appreciate that many people focus intensively on the wisdom and morality of the invasion and finding both lacking in the decision to go to war doubt anything good will come of it, at least nothing that will have justified the human and financial cost entailed. That may be true, but it still doesn't alleviate our obligation to do what we can to produce the best outcomes right now, in my view.

It has given an extremly limited chance at a stable Iraq at the a very real cost of placing soldiers on the ground. It's not obvious that one outweighs the other. The 'it atleast doesn't do any harm' argument doesn't fly. You have to show a reasonable probability that it has accomplished something good.

BrienOToole:

A strategy that has given us a chance to leave a functioning polity (ies) in place, able to hold its own in a region that might eventually adopt an ethos and the structures of mutual security can't be judged anything but a success compared with that alternative.

Let us know if you come up with such a strategy, because we still don't have a functioning polity in place or anything close to it.

I think you're right that costs do demand more than a cursory justification. I also agree that the probability of success has to be carefully calculated and weighed. In my view, another important part of the decision is our responsibility for making Iraq work provided we can help do that. Colin Powell summed up part of that assessment with his, "We break it, we own it." admonition to the President. Even more broadly however, in a region of the world that is so fraught with danger both to itself and the entire world, America has the obligation to weigh in. We owe that to ourselves, 9/11 demonstrated that requirement if it hadn't be clear before. As the world's pre-eminent power we also, I think, have the largest, though by no means the only, share of the responsibility to see that the world functions tolerably well.

Obviously, this a role we can perform brilliantly or abysmally. We've done it both ways, historically, sometimes at the same time. But I think that's the decision point: what needs to get done and how do we, America, help get it done in a way that makes the most sense for ourselves and others. Meaning without overreaching.