This criticism is in no way intended to insult the qualifications or expert knowledge of any of those cited in the piece--Slogger's own Nir Rosen contributes his views to the article--but only to question the one-sidedness of an exploratory exercise hypothesizing on the future of Iraq that begins with an assumption--shared by everyone involved--that all is already lost.
A selection of the comments are below, and the entire piece can be read on Rolling Stone's website.
Zbigniew Brzezinski: If we are willing to engage with all of Iraq's neighbors -- including Iran -- in a regional effort to contain the violence, the best we can hope for is an Iraq that is politically passive but hostile toward America.
Richard Clarke: All the things they say will happen are already happening. Iraq is already a base for terrorists; there is already a civil war. We've got 150,000 troops there now and we can't stop it.
Nir Rosen: There is no best-case scenario for Iraq. It's complete anarchy now. No family is untouched by kidnappings, murders, ethnic cleansing -- everybody lives in a constant state of terror.... That's not only the government's fault, that's our fault: We deliberately created a weak government so that we would have final authority over everything in Iraq.
Michael Scheuer: Even in the best-case scenario, the disaster we're seeing now is nothing compared to the disaster that we'll see after we leave. The real issue here is American interest: The longer we stay, the more people we get killed. I don't think the longer we stay, the better we make Iraq. Probably the reverse.
Gen. Tony McPeak: This is a dark chapter in our history. Whatever else happens, our country's international standing has been frittered away by people who don't have the foggiest understanding of how the hell the world works.
