Pandora's Box

My God... they've lost themselves.

Cenk Uygur, one of my faves at HuffPo, has a column on a recent interview with US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.

First, the ambassador points out that we might have started an enormous problem we can't keep a lid on if we leave Iraq soon:

"A Pandora's box has been opened. The future of the world is at stake here because this region, Iraq, is the defining challenge of our time ... We need to close this in a way that does not produce huge problems down the road, that ultimately produces isolationism at home and a world with far more security problems than at present."

Remember, there was no Pandora's Box in Iraq before we invaded. The US ambassador says it has been opened. Who opened it? Obviously, we did.

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He is also the first administration official to acknowledge the Iraq war might lead to a bigger and more dangerous regional war in the Middle East.

And finally, the ambassador seems to concede that the US had no plan in Iraq until four months ago.

This kind of honesty makes you wonder how the ambassador got a job at the administration. But there is a reason behind this frank talk. The ambassador recognizes that if the government doesn't own up to some of the mistakes they've made, they'll have no credibility left -- this is a realization his bosses in the administration still have not come around to. So, he stands a fair chance of being punished for this transgression. No truth slips out of this White House without a price to pay.

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"People need to be clear what the stakes are here. If we were to do a premature withdrawal, there could be a Shia-Sunni war here that could spread beyond Iraq. And you could have Iran backing the Shias and Sunni Arab states backing the Sunnis. You could have a regional war that could go on for a very long time, and affect the security of oil supplies. Terrorists could take over part of this country and expand from here. And given the resources of Iraq, given the technical expertise of its people, it will make Afghanistan look like child's play."

Why did we not consider this possibility before we invaded? It makes you despair of democracy. We couldn't muster up 51 senators -- or just one president -- who were smart enough to realize this might happen. Ambassador Khalilzad paints this as a possible out come if we leave Iraq prematurely. But the reality is that it is an outcome that is very likely no matter when we leave Iraq.

If we stay longer, are we really going to be able to resolve the Sunni-Shiite conflict? How does training the Shiite army -- because that is what we are doing right now when we train the "Iraqi" army -- help to resolve this conflict? It doesn't. It makes a Sunni bloodbath more likely. Are we under the delusion that when we strengthen the Shiite majority and then leave the country, that the Shiites will be munificent with their new found power?

Cenk concludes:

...I think we should find a way to split Iraq as amicably as possible. You can call it the former Yugoslavia model. The Serbs, Croatians and the Bosnians were not going to be able stay together. So we mitigated the damage by separating them as best as we could. There were a lot of pitfalls along the way and left to their own devices, they would have had more ethnic cleansings and more civil wars. But the world worked together to find a solution that was not ideal, but the best we could do.

If we could do the same in Iraq, we would be a thousand times better off than we are now. If we don't change course, the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia is going to look like a picnic compared to what happens in Iraq.

It's perfectly legitimate to think this solution is not the best one available. But what is not legitimate is to think our current strategy is working. We need to have a national debate on this issue and we need to do it right now.

More stay the course speeches like the one President Bush gave this morning will lead us further down the rabbit hole. We need to get out of the hole and figure out what direction we're going. Then we could move on to what should be the second part of the discussion -- in what time frame will we carry out our plan for Iraq?