Rich: I agree about the Fallows piece. Did you read the other piece in that issue of Atlantic, the one by Nir Rosen: “If America Left Iraq — The Case for Cutting and Running”? Naturally it was more up my street, though some of Rosen’s dismissals struck me as a bit too airy.

The piece is, in fact, a sort of photographic negative of the everything’s-going-along-just-fine! pieces you get from the cheerier sort of administration apologists. Cutting and running would, I feel sure, be nastier than Rosen tells us (though he is surely right about the Kurds). And that is not even to mention the larger geostrategic consequences of what everyone and his uncle would spin as a US defeat–the only argument at all persuasive to me for lingering in that sinkhole another week. On balance however I still favor a swift exit, though not “running” but marching, with the bands playing, and with ferocious return fire against anyone who tried to take advantage. (And after putting Saddam up against a wall and perforating him, as we should have done right after we caught the rat.) What we left behind would be an awful mess… though I believe that will be true whenever we leave.