Getting Out of Iraq

"The key word in 'exit strategy' is not 'exit' but 'strategy,'" said Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam. At a recent congressional hearing, Cleland warned that the United States must plan its withdrawal before U.S. forces have to pile into helicopters and beat a hasty retreat from a besieged Green Zone in Baghdad. "We need an exit strategy that we choose -- or it will certainly be chosen for us," Cleland said. "I've seen this movie before. I know how it ends."

The primary argument against pulling out of Iraq is that without the continued presence of American troops, the country will become a stronghold for Islamic militants -- and perhaps even Al Qaeda. With the president of Iran calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map," and with the family of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad implicated in an assassination in Lebanon, the Middle East is a tough neighborhood, the Bush administration argues -- one that requires the firm hand of an American presence. "State sponsors like Syria and Iran have a long history of collaboration with terrorists," Bush said. "This enemy considers every retreat of the civilized world as an invitation to greater violence. In Iraq, there is no peace without victory."

But much of America's foreign-policy establishment -- including many national-security hard-liners and ultraconservatives -- says the Bush administration has the equation backward: The presence of American troops is increasing, rather than averting, the danger in Iraq. Gen. William Odom, director of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan and now a senior fellow with the far-right Hudson Institute, is circulating a paper titled "What's Wrong With Cutting and Running?" Point by point, Odom demolishes objections to a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. "There is no question the insurgents and other anti-American parties will take over the government once we leave," he writes. "But that will happen no matter how long we stay."

The longer the U.S. remains in Iraq, Odom argues, the more Iraq will become a haven for radical-Islamic terrorism -- and the more Iran will exercise influence over the fundamentalist Shiite regime that Washington is propping up in Baghdad. Standing outside the U.S. Capitol, Odom tells me that the administration should move swiftly to withdraw. If ordered to do so by the White House, he says, the Pentagon could provide a blueprint for a feasible exit plan "in two or three weeks."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hard-liner who served as national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, also believes that it is time to declare victory and withdraw. "The sooner we can get out, the better," Brzezinski says. "We could use some opportunity in the short term to say that we have accomplished our main purpose in Iraq and start a serious process of disengagement."