In a Bind

I'm now officially a registered voter in Connecticut and, as you know, we have an extremely important Senate election coming up. While many of my political sympathies lie with Lamont, I simply cannot get over his planned withdrawl of troops from Iraq. While there certainly is a case to be made for doing so, it doesn't seem to me like Lamont has fully contemplated or understood it. The case he makes is purely political: out with the Bushites, in with the Dems, reorient our policy to appease American discontent with the failure of this war. Pretty straight-forward. I think such a policy, however, will doom us to a catastrophic foreign policy failure, a kind of failure which may not immediately become apparent, but which will have far-reaching consequences for the first half of this century. Our withdrawl will be seen as the first major (or second major, after 9/11) victory for the Jihadists of the 21st century. It will turn Iraq, until--if ever--it is secured, into a Jihadist training ground and base from which efforts to destabilize surrounding countries will be launched--Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc. Iraqi security forces are nowhere near ready to deal with this possibility, nor with the task of preventing all out civil war.

While Lamont makes the case, admittedly a compelling one, that our presence in Iraq is simply keeping these security forces from taking the task onto their own shoulders, the stakes are far too high for us to risk this hypothesis being wrong following our withdrawl.

It seems there a few courses of action the U.S. can now take (as laid out by a professor in a class of mine):

1) Pull-out, trusting that the long-term forces of history will prove our democratization strategy right.
2) Draw down forces, leaving some behind to train and provide intelligence for Iraqi forces.
3) Bring in more troops to secure the country once and for all.
4) Let the three competing sectors of Iraqi society (Shia, Sunni, Kurd) duke it out in hopes that they will eventually balance each other out and reach a stable settlement.
5) Partition the country into three sovereign entities along religious/ethnic lines.
6) Maintain status-quo.
7) Cut a deal with the Iranians.

It seems like 2) and 3) are the only possible solutions, with 3) being vastly unpopular, although certainly the best course of action. 2), although the most popular, will undoubtedly provide our enemies with an enormous symbolic victory.

So where do my allegiances lie? To a Senator who got us into this awful war, but who offers a more realistic and feasible solution to it? Or a Senator with great social policies, but a politically-driven and dangerously naive approach to this war? To the people of Connecticut and of New Haven--this sad and poor city which is, at least for now, my own--whose lives would undoubtedly be bettered by Lamont's election? Or the people of Iraq, whose lives would surely be made worse?