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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Experts: Quitting Iraq now would be a bad idea

Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON — Americans who are telling pollsters they want U.S. troops out of Iraq could see some nasty consequences if President Bush heeded their wishes, foreign policy experts warn.

At worst, the results could include:

“ A civil war in Iraq resulting in far greater bloodshed than the current conflict, though presumably without further U.S. losses.

“ The transformation of western Iraq, which is dominated by Sunni Muslims, into a haven for international terrorists from al-Qaida and other groups.

“ A collapse of U.S. credibility among nations of the Middle East, whose leaders would probably distance themselves from Washington.

“ A collapse of the Bush administration’s push for democracy in the region.

“ Instability in the Persian Gulf that could lead to steep increases in oil prices, driving the cost of gasoline beyond current record levels.

“All those things might not come to pass, but I think you would enter into a very turbulent period of instability, and the likelihood of all those events happening would go up significantly,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The Bush administration’s strategy is for U.S. troops to train enough Iraqi military and security forces to protect the country’s new democratic system, then gradually leave. But that can’t be done overnight, said Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who follows Iraq closely.

While the number of trained Iraqi troops and police has reached 169,000, about 30,000 more than the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, the Iraqis aren’t nearly experienced enough to take over the fight, he said.

“This effort is going to take well into 2007 at the earliest before they can be cut to more limited levels,” Cordesman said of U.S. troops.

U.S. forces also are helping protect the elected Iraqi interim government as it tries to write a constitution by August and hold a referendum on it by October.

“If the U.S. withdrew its troops too quickly, in all likelihood the Sunni Arab guerrillas would simply take the new government out and shoot it,” said Juan Cole, a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan.

As the Sunnis then tried to rule Iraq, “the Kurds and the Shiite south would resist, and likely there would be very substantial violence,” Cole wrote in an e-mail.

Cordesman agreed that if U.S. troops were withdrawn too soon, the “end result of that is very clear: There’s almost certainly going to be a civil war in Iraq.”

Even many critics of the administration’s decision to go into Iraq say U.S. forces must stay long enough to achieve a stable democratic government. While anti-war groups and a few members of Congress have called for a withdrawal, no mainstream analysts have advocated pulling troops out altogether.

P.J. Crowley, a senior spokesman for the Pentagon and the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, said that while he and others thought before the invasion that Iraq was not a legitimate target in the war on terrorism, its role as a magnet for Islamic extremists has made it one.

Reed ventured that a U.S. pullout under current circumstances would “embolden the Islamists, just as they were emboldened by the Russians’ departure from Afghanistan.”

(A withdrawal that left an Iraqi government unable to defend itself also would shatter U.S. standing in the Middle East, making it hard for moderate Arabs to stand up to Islamic extremists who hope to overthrow their governments, Cordesman said.

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and other U.S. allies would find it “very, very hard … to hold together and deal with this problem without distancing themselves from the United States,” he said. “And we need to remember that we are talking about a region in the gulf with 60 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves.”

But others said the polls reflect a fragility of support that suggests a shocking setback could shatter it, as the 1968 Tet Offensive did to public support for the war in Vietnam.

Polls indicating a growing eagerness among the American public for a troop withdrawal reflect disillusionment based on a “gap between what the public is told — ‘We’re winning’ — and what they see on television, which is dramatically different,” he contended.

“If you have some kind of setback that has not been anticipated, the politics both in Iraq and the United States could come together and determine that a substantial withdrawal of U.S. forces is necessary.”