Leave aside the incredible ethical sleight-of-hand such a position entails - the argument requires one to take the position that an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression and the subsuquent occupation of a sovereign nation can be justified on the basis that ending the occupation could make things more chaotic for both the occupying power and the people being occupied. In other words, stability is more important than the rule of law and democracy (ironically a proposition that is the exact opposite of the rationale originally employed by the Neocons to justify the invasion in 2003).
As Greenwald astutely notes, the risks of invading a sovereign country were all but ignored by the mainstream media (i.e., endless occupation, civil war, intense anti-American anger in the Middle East and around the world, regional instability, conflict with Iraq's neighbors, unpredictable consequences, the need to resort to limitlessly brutal means to subdue the population, the temptation to establish a permanent presence) back in 2003.
And, as he goes on to point out: "Exactly this same deficiency plagues our debate now over whether to stay or leave". He goes on to explain that:
We are constantly told that any responsible, serious person -- even those who believe the original invasion was a mistake and/or that the subsequent war was terribly "mismanaged" -- must take into account all of the horrible things that will allegedly occur if we withdraw "precipitously." Terrible mayhem and violence will be the result, we are told, and therefore no responsible person would be in favor of straightforward withdrawal, because the risks are too great.
But these same pundits who dole out lectures about how Seriousness requires an acknowledgment of risks focus -- just as they did when advocating the invasion -- on only one side of the risk ledger. These Serious War Pundits studiously ignore the risks of keeping 150,000 troops in the middle of that region under the control of George Bush and Dick Cheney. There is virtually no discussion of the risks of that course of action. Exactly this same deficiency plagues our debate now over whether to stay or leave.
One significant risk from keeping our troops there is a heightened likelihood of a war with Iran developing - launched perhaps by the US bombing some pre-identified military targets (and maybe some civilian targets as well?) The reason for this is obvious:
One of the most under-discussed facts with regard to Iraq is that the very people who conceived of the invasion and who are the architects of our current military strategy have always believed, and still believe, that we must go to war with Iran. Our current strategy in Iraq was designed and, to a large degree, implemented with that goal in mind.
It's actually quite easy to imagine the way Bush's foreign policy brain-trust are imagining all of this going down: With tens of thousands of our troops stationed in two of Iran's neighboring countries, and the belligerent rhetoric and provocative actions escalating on both sides, nothing would be easier than provoking an "emergency" which would "justify" a military action against Iran. It worked as a method for selling the Iraq invasion to the American people in 2003 and they might very well imagine it will work again for Iran.
Bush's real policy objective for invading Iraq, Greenwald postulates, was to establish a permanent military presence in Iraq. Thus, continuing the occupation due to a lack of "progress" in pacifying Iraq is actually a success for Bush because we don't actually want to leave in the first place. This theory has a good deal of supporting evidence behind it (see this post from last June as well as this post from this week's TomDispatch). By the way, I think it's pretty obvious that another major reason behind the invasion was as a for the US to gain control of Iraq's massive petroleum reserves (see here and here), but this may have been a secondary consideration compared with establishing the permanent military bases.
Greenwald closes by posing a rhetorical question: "Whatever the "benefits" supposedly are from staying, are they worth incurring the substantial risk that we are enabling our country's warmongers to achieve their real goal of spreading our war beyond Iraq to their long list of Middle East Enemies, beginning with Iran?" To this question, I would add, "Is it worth the lives of hundreds or possibly thousands of American troops and even more Iraqi civilians due to logistical concerns of chaos following our withdrawal.
The bottom line, I think, is that we will ultimately have to withdraw our troops from Iraq, probably a lot sooner than the neocon foreign policy architects are currently planning on. The administration has already lost the public's support for the occupation, and eventually the public's anger will become too loud to keep ignoring. Crucially, the US occupation has also lost support from the Iraqi Parliament, which voted last month for the establishment of a timetable for a US military withdrawal of its country.
When we do withdrawal, there will indeed be mass chaos and the potential for a civil war breaking out between the Sunnis and Shiites. Lots and lots of people will be killed. The longer the wait, the more ridiculous our rationales for maintaining our military presence in the center of the Middle East region will appear, the more money our country will have flushed down the toilet and the more men, women and children will have been killed for absolutely no reason other than to secure Pax America.
Update: I found this article discussing the rationale for setting a timetable for withdrawal by MIT Political Science professor Barry Posen from the January/February 2006 issue of the Boston Review that I think pretty closely captures my position on the debate. The fact that this was written a year and a half ago reinforces just how prescient Posen's analysis was.
I'm not going to even bother excerpting from the piece since each and every paragraph contains in it such strong analysis that it ought to be read. Go check it out now.
Update #2: Also, check out this thought-provoking article by Professor Lawrence Wittner in Foreign Policy in Focus entitled "How the Peace Movement Can Win". Noting that peace activists helped swing the elections in November and most Americans want out of Iraq, Wittner asks why the peace movement hasn't succeeded already in ending the war.
He provides some good historical context, specifically drawing parallels to the Peace Movement's role in ending the Vietnam War, and concludes that "if peace activists are serious about reining in the forces of militarism, they should recognize that a movement composed of small, independent peace groups and large numbers of unaffiliated individuals is simply not up to that task. To attain organizational cohesion, strength, and programmatic direction, the movement needs a powerful national peace organization, with a mass membership. Only then will it be in a position to effectively challenge the masters of war, impress the politicians, and set the United States on a new, peaceful course in world affairs."
Update #3: Matt Yglesias explains how the continuing occupation has not and cannot succeed at eliminating the al Qaeda presence in Iraq (one of the administration's key justifications for maintaining our troop levels there:
The US-sponsored alliance of Sunni Arab nationalists in Anbar Province aimed at ejecting al-Qaeda seems to be fracturing as some elements of the alliance accuse others of being dupes and collaborators with the American occupiers. And, of course, this is the essence of the problem. It's simply impossible for the United States of America to be the main sponsor of a credible nationalist resistance to al-Qaeda. The only way to take advantage of Sunni Arab discontent with foreign fighters in Iraq is for us to step out of the way and stop trying to micromanage events. Instead, though, we insert ourselves into every embryonic promising trend and wind up wrecking it.
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