Five years and 4,000 US deaths into the Iraq war, it is no longer clear what a reasonable exit strategy might be. In November, America will either elect a bellicose war veteran who thinks US troops could remain in Iraq for “a thousand years” or “a million” so long as they prevent “American casualties” — or a Democrat who has promised swift withdrawal but is politic enough to leave the details vague. Neither outcome offers much hope that America’s endgame will be smarter than its bungled occupation. No candidate has dared to suggest how they would handle the genocidal chaos that could follow a collapse of the Maliki government, nor how they would prevent the surge-created partitions from metastasizing into a regional war. And so a conflict that may end up costing between three and five trillion dollars, according to the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, will be passed to a president eager to march further into the quagmire or to one whose good intentions will be constrained by whatever “facts on the ground” are left by the final months of this administration’s military and political guesswork.
