Iraq War: Too much faith in US power

On Thursday, Eric Alterman posted as his MSNBC blog:

Those awful pictures from Falluja are a necessary part of Americans’ education and must be shown to them just as frequently as the deliberate deceptions the media so gullibly passed along when the president was misleading us into war.  As horrific and inhuman as these actions may be, Bush asked for this.  He invaded another country in near complete ignorance of its history and traditions, in defiance of world opinion, and on the basis of dishonest and trumped-up arguments.  What’s more, he and Cheney ensured the failure of the post-war plans by refusing even to consult with experts who knew something about the region, even those in our own government.  The result has been an unending series of easily predictable catastrophes that are worsening by the day.  Knowing the ways of the all-powerful Karl Rove, I predict he will instruct Bush to cut and run before Election Day.  The question is, Will Cheney second the motion?  Will the media allow them to get away with it?

While I share his general sentiment and his low opinion of the Bush team, this is also an example of how both supporters and opponents of the Iraq War tend to assume that the United States has the power to dictate a desirable outcome. What Alterman assumes is technically true. Bush could decide tomorrow to order all American troops out of Iraq immediately. But, in practice, there are constraints on the United States' ability to do that.

Iraq could fall into civil war if the US exited quickly. It could become another "failed state" like the Afghanistan that sheltered and nurtured al-Qaeda. Since Iraq has virtually no army, its neighbors - Turkey, Iran, Syria - might be tempted to take military action to secure their own interests or defend their partisans. And what what happen to all those Halliburton and Bechtel contracts?

As Col Patrick Lang (ret.) put it on the PBS Newshour of 04/01/04 , in fact this is going to take an awful lot of troops, they'll stay for along time in very close contact with people who are quite hostile, and we just have to steel ourselves to the prospect that it's going to be a long tough thing." I hope there's another alternative.