Dec 13, 2005 3:47 PM

Yugoslavia, With Oil

Say we do get out. And civil war breaks out in earnest.

Given how ruthless the various factions in Iraq have been toward one another under our occupation, it's not unreasonable to assume things could get much worse in our absence.

New York Times magazine contributor Noah Feldman, who seems like an honest broker despite having been an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, says the resulting conflict could be devastating:

Lebanon-in-Vietnam -- a rough approximation of the horror that would follow -- really would mark a defeat for the United States, one that would leave many thousands dead and probably could not be cabined within the borders of Iraq. Unbearably enough, such a catastrophe would look like the kind of situation that often leads humanitarians in the United States to call for intervention.

In short order we could be looking at the kind of carnage and ethnic strife that, like Kosovo, called for American firepower. Indeed, by rushing to end an occupation that well meaning liberals despise, we could set the stage for the kind of humanitarian catastrophe that well meaning liberals are keen to use military power to bring to a halt.

I think anyone advocating a quick withdrawal needs to address that possibility, as well as Feldman's second point: that an Iraqi civil war "probably could not be cabined within the borders of Iraq."

If Iraq implodes and draws Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and Turkey and/or their proxies into a wider regional conflict, the global economy could be in for a world of hurt, and we could come to look back fondly on these violent days of occupation.

As liberal Middle East scholar and prominent blogger Juan Cole told me in a recent interview:

People who say that we already have a civil war in Iraq just have no idea what they're talking about. I've seen civil war with my own eyes in Lebanon; it's not like that. Militias become armies that fight each other. That's not what's going on in Iraq. It's orders of magnitude worse. The death toll would be much worse and the displacement of people would be much worse.

Unlike the Iran/Iraq war -- where a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction logic prevented either side from targeting the other's pipelines -- Cole argues, the region's oil infrastructure could become a major target:

Pipeline sabotage as a result of a regional guerrilla war could take like 20 percent of the world's petroleum of the global market -- now that's a Depression. That's 1930s.

I don't claim to know enough to predict that any of this would happen. Just that it could happen. And that too many withdrawal proponents have yet to grapple honestly with these questions.

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