August 5th, 2008 by Sarah

Stephen Biddle, Michael O’Hanlon, and Kenneth Pollack put forth a plan for Iraq in Foreign Affairs  that can “partly square Obama’s goal of redeploying large numbers of U.S. forces sooner rather than later, with McCain’s goal of ensuring stability in Iraq.” The authors argue that threatening withdrawal is likely to only derail what progress has been made politically. Instead, they recommend that “reconciliation can be done slowly, via small steps, then each stage of compromise is likely to be tolerable, with the risk of one holdout party exploiting the others kept to a manageable level” so that the U.S. “should be able to cut its presence in Iraq substantially — perhaps by half — over the course of 2010 and 2011.”

Posted in Election 08, Iraq, Sectarianism, US foreign policy |