Beyond Quagmire

BEST-CASE SCENARIO
CIVIL WAR IN IRAQ AND A STRONGER AL QAEDA

Zbigniew Brzezinski: If we are willing to engage with all of Iraq's neighbors -- including Iran -- in a regional effort to contain the violence, the best we can hope for is an Iraq that is politically passive but hostile toward America.

Gen. Tony McPeak: It's not a question of whether we're going to leave Iraq -- it's a question of when. And everybody in Iraq knows that. So they say, "Fine. We'll stock arms and wait for you guys to leave. And then we'll do what we want."

But the administration has repeatedly highlighted the potential for chaos in Iraq after our departure as a reason we must stay and fight.

Richard Clarke: All the things they say will happen are already happening. Iraq is already a base for terrorists; there is already a civil war. We've got 150,000 troops there now and we can't stop it.

Nir Rosen: There is no best-case scenario for Iraq. It's complete anarchy now. No family is untouched by kidnappings, murders, ethnic cleansing -- everybody lives in a constant state of terror. Leaving aside Kurdistan, which is very different, there's nobody in Iraq who is safe. You can get killed for being a Sunni, for being a Shia, for being educated, for being part of the former regime, for being part of the current regime. The Americans are still killing Iraqi civilians left and right. There's no government in Iraq; it doesn't exist outside of the Green Zone. That's not only the government's fault, that's our fault: We deliberately created a weak government so that we would have final authority over everything in Iraq.

Michael Scheuer: Even in the best-case scenario, the disaster we're seeing now is nothing compared to the disaster that we'll see after we leave. The real issue here is American interest: The longer we stay, the more people we get killed. I don't think the longer we stay, the better we make Iraq. Probably the reverse.

What happens to the civil war between Iraq's Sunni and Shia Arabs when we leave?

Juan Cole: The civil war will go on for five or ten years -- that's inevitable. But the best-case scenario is, at the end of it they find a way to come back together as a nation-state, like Lebanon did in 1989.

Rosen: People are talking about a reconciliation process, but Iraqi Shias don't want to compromise with the Sunnis. They don't have to. There's going to be a genocide of Sunnis in Baghdad. The Shia have the numbers to do it; they can absorb all the Sunni car bombs it takes. The Americans aren't capable of stopping it; they can't tell a Sunni from a Shia. The best you can hope for is that it doesn't spill into the neighboring countries.

McPeak: You have to hope that Iraq devolves into a federal state with three strong regional governments. But that has its downsides: The Turks would go berserk. They would see Kurdistan as a base for the Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey, which has bedeviled them like the IRA in Ireland or the Basques in Spain. And if Iraq devolves into three separate "stans," then it's going to be pretty tough for Sunnistan not to provide a retirement home for Al Qaeda agents. It's got warts all over it -- but among the "don't call my baby ugly" possibilities in this world, that looks the prettiest.

So even in the best of scenarios, Al Qaeda has a lasting base in Iraq?

Paul Pillar: The president made it sound like Osama bin Laden is poised to march into Baghdad and take up residence in one of Saddam's old palaces and rule this terrorist state. Nothing of the sort is possible -- even as a worst-case scenario. It is true that five years from now, the same people honing their skills in Anbar province may form the cell that will try to pull off another 9/11. But that's going to happen regardless of what we do. We have the best chance of minimizing those sorts of costs by getting out. At least that takes away the anti-American cause célèbre effect of our presence there.

Scheuer: No matter what happens now, the Islamists will have beaten both of the superpowers -- first the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and now the United States in the heart of Islam. The impact of that in Islamic civilization is going to be enormous. We have made bin Laden a prophet: His organizing concept for Al Qaeda was "The Russians are a lot tougher than the Americans. If we can beat the Russians, then we can eventually beat the Americans." Even more important, Al Qaeda will have contiguous territory on the Arab peninsula to attack from.

Where does that leave Israel?

Scheuer: The neoconservatives and their war in Iraq have made Israeli security worse than at any time since 1967. You'll see more and more people trying to launch attacks in Israel who are not Palestinian or Lebanese. None of it bodes well for a Middle East peace settlement.