Meanwhile, in Iraq

Over the weekend it was reported that Americans seriously underestimate the death toll for Iraqi civilians. Nor does it seem likely that the situation will improve if US forces leave. In The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (p. 298), Barack Obama recounts a conversation with reporters during his visit to Baghdad in January of 2006, just after the news had come of Jill Carroll's kidnapping, and the killing of her driver:

Such violence wasn't unusual in Baghdad these days, they said, although Iraqis overwhelmingly bore the brunt of it. Fighting between Shi'ites and Sunnis had become widespread, less strategic, less comprehensible, more frightening. None of them thought that the elections would bring about significant improvement in the security situation. I asked them if they thought a U.S. troop withdrawal might ease tensions, expecting them to answer in the affirmative. Instead, they shook their heads.

"My best guess is the country would collapse into civil war within weeks," one of the reporters told me. "One hundred, maybe two hundred thousand dead. We're the only thing holding this place together."

Senator Obama is presently advocating that American forces withdraw from Iraq by 2008, but Michael Oren warns that

[y]ou cannot withdraw from Iraq and be confident that the enemy is not going to follow you. Because the enemy is going to follow you. America can’t detach from the Middle East because the Middle East is not going to detach from America.

There are other risks, too, inherent in this proposal. Nearly three years ago, Goh Chok Tong briefly discussed some of the likely consequences:

If the U.S., for some reason or other, has to depart unceremoniously from Iraq, that has a larger consequence than just the defeat of the U.S. in Iraq by the insurgents. All the terrorists in the world, all the rogue states, will know that the U.S. does not have stamina when it gets into a fight. And worse, your friends and allies will know that you lack staying power, and your friends will begin not to support you, because they are in this with you. Singapore is in Iraq with you. Because of the casualties, the American population is divided. It wants the government to pull the troops out. No friend of yours will stand behind you in the future. So, that's an important point which Americans have got to consider, that it's now no more a Republican battle, or Democratic battle. It is America's prestige which is at stake in the world. Right or wrong, you are in this already.

Sometimes an exit's an exit. But sometimes, Jean-Paul Sartre said it best.