Doug Ollivant on Leaving Iraq

According to our friend (who for reasons both philosophical and military knows what he’s talking about), Iraq has to be free to stand on its own. Here’s why:

At this point, Iraq is exactly where we should expect a country to be when coming out of forced regime change, with the almost inevitable civil strife and violence that follows. This is what success looks like. No, it’s not very pretty. The hard-won fragile stability of Iraq should serve as a cautionary tale to those across the political spectrum who promote regime change as a policy, whether for reasons of national interest or on humanitarian grounds. Removing a functioning regime, however distasteful it may be, puts the population into something approaching a state of nature, and condemns the innocent population to a great deal of suffering as normal societal systems and institutions break down and are then re-established only gradually over time. All of that death and destruction inevitably makes for a fragile polity, culturally unstable and economically naive. But the only way Iraq can move forward at this is to let it grow up, like a teenager cut loose.

Our experience in Iraq as “cautionary tale” is one reason, of course, for the modest but real Ron Paul surge. And it’s why even Romney is saying that if we could roll the camera back we wouldn’t engage in “forced regime change.”