With the leaks of two classified documents from the British government showing, shall we say, "concern" within the British government for Bush's ersatz <i>causus belli</i> and the lack of post-war planning, even former war supporters like Rep. Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones are losing their faith. Although Congress voted down a measure demanding a withdrawal timetable from the White House, the fact that opinion polls are showing the majority of the public is now against the war, or at least Bush's handling of it.

I was talking about Iraq with my friend Michelle a while ago–we were (are) both opposed to the war. She talked about the need for immediate withdrawal. Though you may think it uncharacteristic of me, I cautioned against leaving Iraq too soon.

One of the major reasons I opposed the war in the first place was that I recognized that there was no good way out of Iraq once we got in. Whether you think our aspirations were noble, deceitful, or misguided, it's clear that Iraq has yet to acheive sustainable self-government, and is a long way from being stable.

During the buildup to the war, I noticed that my long-time idol, Christopher Hitchens, had thrown his support behind the U.S. invasion, much to the horror of his left-leaning colleagues. Instinctively, I knew it had to have something to do with his long-standing association with the Kurdish rebel army, who have been awaiting the arrival of the U.S. armed forces for many years. Hitchens made a simple moralistic case for the invasion: Saddam was a brutal tyrant and murderer, and somebody needed to take him out.

The problem, as I've said before, is that you can't just depose a government without creating a new one, even if that 'creation' is just a power vacuum. You can see the chronic and tragic short-sightedness of the war policy in the memo complaining of a lack of post-war planning. If "the goal of this war is peace" as Big Brother Bush had claimed (without the slightest trace of irony), wouldn't it stand to reason that the first thing you would do when considering the invasion was to have a post-war plan in place? Isn't the post-war the whole point of this exercise? Given the superiority of U.S. military might, and the supposed moral imperatives involved, you'd think the battle planning would have been the afterthought, instead of the other way around.

Now, when Hitchens went on the Daily show a while ago, Jon Stewart asked when all of this (meaning the turmoil in Iraq) would be over, and Hitchens joked that they would both be old or dead. That's because Hitchens realizes this is a long-term game. Nations don't get built over a year or two, but over generations. Bear this in mind, because I'm going to come back to it in a moment.

Let's return to the Saddam's Iraq. While the general repression of his population continued during peacetime, most of the war crimes people always mention (the gassing of the Kurds is the unavoidable example) were executed with the tacit consent (and military hardware) of the very same people who were now declaring that he was a menace to the rest of the world when this clearly was not the case. If you don't believe me, go ask Donald Rumsfeld where he was on March 24, 1984. With the no-fly zone (but even more so with inspectors running around), the heyday of Saddam's tyranny was behind him.

Now, let's consider what we were (allegedly) trying to accomplish with post-war Iraq–a stable democracy and the end of the Ba'ath regime. In the American narrative, the way we affect change in other countries is either to bomb them or to give them money. And most of us (Halliburton's French subsidiary notwithstanding) weren't going to give Saddam money. In this bifurcated world, these are the only two options.

But consider that without the force of the central government, the multi-ethnic state of Iraq is incoherent. Iraq-watchers saw the potential for a Yugoslav-like breakdown and civil war as soon as Saddam died or was deposed. Lo and behold, the insurgency has a distinctively Sunni flavor, and the U.S.-installed government is more closely aligned with Shi'ites (and uses the Kurds as a wedge against a broader insurgency, although this may short-lived depending on how the issue of Kirkuk's oil is resolved). The civil war has already begun.

So the question is now, how has the U.S. occupation benefitted Iraq versus an organic decline of the Ba'ath? Are U.S. troops peacekeepers or Sunni bodyguards? Is our military presence a hindrance or a catalyst for Western-style democracy in the Arab world?
I think a civil war was inevitable; but our presence there has merely hastened it, with the added benefits of making us look like an unnecessary, racist aggressor while poisoning the whole country with even more radioactive material than we had dropped on them the last time. If, as Hitchens and I maintain, we need to look at this from a long-term perspective, what was the real difference we made by acting now, instead of letting Iraq determine its own future? Saddam out of power? Check. Civil war? Check.

This being said, why did I caution against an early withdrawal? Because we've already done plenty of damage, and the resulting chaos could get even worse for Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire between an undertrained government militia and the insurgency. Not to mention that a withdrawal would probably look bad, although it's certainly debatable whether the initial invasion or a premature withdrawal makes us look worse in the eyes of the world. On the other hand, there exists a very real possibility that we are making things worse every day we stay there.

As I said, there's no good way out. If we recalled every one of our troops tomorrow, I certainly wouldn't be angry about it, (and it would relieve the incredible financial strain these wars are putting on the federal budget) but the spin out will be disastrous. The problem is that the spin out is already disastrous, but we don't know how much worse it will get. Did we forsee our maintenance of bases in Saudi Arabia would result directly in two planes flying into the Twin Towers? If somebody did, I would love to talk to them. As I've noted before, we're currently running the world's largest terrorist training camp, so I wonder where its graduates will go after we're gone (or mostly gone). The Afghan Arabs took about a decade to turn their training against us, how long will these terrorists take?

In any case, we're building several permanent bases in Iraq, so we'll be there for a long time. Will this ultimately lead to stability for Iraq and Iraqis? Our experience up to this point tells us no. Even worse, at what point will we know it's the perfect moment to withdraw? I'm all for immediate withdrawal, as long as we stop pretending there won't be any consequences.