Bloodless Coup

as a leftie i'm not at all bothered by the fact that this possibility:

"[Stratfor] recommend[s] withdrawing U.S. forces to the periphery of Iraq and letting the inevitable civil war take place in the center."

really irks me. it's going to be the worst kind of free-for-all if we leave now, and the results won't be any more democratic, or in other regards any more desirable, than what was going on there before to supposedly justify our incursion.

i'm still with the you break it you buy it camp, and with a wholesale overhaul of our approach. though i recognize the validity of the Stratfor points, which suggests this is precisely the vietnamesque intractable quagmire bush was warned about. so ugly.

The bigger question is what we can settle for. If we give up (either bail out or pull back to peripheral armed camps, as stratfor seems to recommend), we not only lose any hope of a friendly Iraq but also lose a big chunk of credibility in the MidEast and all over the world. The first is more tangible, but the more interesting debate is over the second. What does our credibility mean? How much is it worth? It isn't easily measured, which makes it that much harder to debate.