Reply #5: Scary.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

The outcome of this can't possibly be good. First off, there's no way that we're leaving. Let's for the sake of argument say that the Sunni and Shi'a join forces to kick the US out. Then what? With us out of the way, they'll get right down to the business of trying to massacare each other out of fear that one group will end up with control of the country and commit genocide against the other. Iraq has no functioning government without us at this point (not that what's there now is functioning too well.) The governing council doesn't have the support of the people and will immediately dissolve if we don't prop it up. So let's just say that we leave. What happens then? There are more Shi'a than Sunni, but the Sunni have most of the money, arms, and a lot of the Republican Guard and other trained soldiers. Iran will immediately step in to keep the Shiites from being slaughtered, and there's a good chance that they'll succeed at least to some degree. We'd end up with Iran in control of large portions of Iraq. That isn't acceptible to us, and our likely response would be to bomb the hell out of Tehran or in some other way prevent them from exercising control over the Shi'a areas of Iraq. Everyone knows that the arab response to US aggression against Iran would be catastropic. It's reasonable to theorize that with Iraq in crisis (and as such being an *excellent* staging area for al Qaeda, etc) and us fighting Iran, that other governments in the region would come under pressure to get involved in the war, or be destabilized by its consequences. It could result in region-wide turbulence, maybe even in the fall of the Saudi government, given their past relationship with us. In this scenario, (even with Saudi leadership intact) we'd see massive fluctuations in the oil markets, which could very quickly cause worldwide economic chaos.

This is only one of many possible scenarios for what might happen if we pull out of Iraq. It's a worst-case scenario, but plausible. In any case, nobody thinks that any Sunni or Shi'a solidarity generated by ousing the US would last long enough for the country to establish a reasonable government. A civil war in an Iraq w/o a US presence almost guarantees that the Iranians will do something really stupid, and that's the elephant in the living room as far as I'm concerned.