Exit-stential Dilemma

Faithful readers know that I like to quote stuff like No Exit and Waiting For Godot when discussing a variety of topics.  Having read this article at Defense and the National Interest today, I can't decide which play is more apt:

[The United States'] Iraqi exit strategy rests on two clear contingent assumptions: The first is the idea of building up Iraqi defense forces powerful enough to do what the US military forces manifestly can not do — bring security to the Iraqi people. Once this is achieved, the second assumption is that the Iraqis will, under the benign tutelage of the United States (the very country the Iraqi people hold responsible for their current state of insecurity and impoverishment), build a strong, pro-western, democratic government with institutions that are honest enough — and capable enough — to bring stability and a realistic promise of prosperity to the Iraqi people. In theory, this enabling sequence will generate within the Iraqi people a vested interested in maintaining a friendly, western-oriented democracy which will create a kind of political force field that will somehow transform the corrupt authoritarian governments of Middle East, thereby bringing peace to the region, including Palestine.
...
Iraqization — like its failed antecedent, Vietnamization — is also a contingent strategy. Like the design of its failed predecessor, success in the first goal — building up security forces — is a necessary pre-condition for success in the second goal.
...
In short, the contingent strategy of Iraqizing the War gives the adversary TIME to attract sympathizers and ratchet up his cycle of escalating hit-and-run offensive operations. And mounting destruction and chaos makes TIME more costly to America by further alienating other nations, particularly the important democracies of Western Europe, and because mounting American casualties will insensibly increase popular discontent and widen those divisions on the home front which were created in the first place by the misrepresentations used by the Administration to justify the war...

The entire thing is a must read.

ntodd

[Update: according to Holden at First Draft, the strategery appears to be working.]