November 29, 2006: New York Times Pundit Says America Must Either Leave Iraq Within 10 Months or Accept 10 Years of Reconstruction

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist who has recently been made a figure of fun for predicting resolution in Iraq “within six months” for the last three years (see May 6-11, 2006), writes that Iraq will be resolved one way or another within “10 months.” Friedman expands on his new prediction, saying Iraq “is so broken it can’t even have a proper civil war. There are so many people killing so many other people for so many different reasons—religion, crime, politics—that all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable.… Iraq is in so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police, and the army, that nobody seems able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war—it’s gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle. Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shi’ite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and political culture from scratch. Anyone who tells you that we can just train a few more Iraqi troops and police officers and then slip out in two or three years is either lying or a fool. The minute we would leave, Iraq would collapse. There is nothing we can do by the end of the Bush presidency that would produce a self-sustaining stable Iraq—and ‘self-sustaining’ is the key metric.” Friedman concludes: “This has left us with two impossible choices. If we’re not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave—because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.” [New York Times, 11/29/2006] Four months ago, Friedman had written that the only way to resolve Iraq was to stop trying to rebuild the country and just find a way to exit gracefully (see August 4, 2006).