Nice Exit Strategy If You Can Get It

Philip Carter lays out a step-by-step withdrawal protocol for getting our troops out of Iraq. The only variable he leaves out, of course, is the most important: the time line. Carter writes as if this were how to get the entire U.S. presence (soldiers, ancillary military personnel and private contractors) to skedaddle from the country at once. That wouldn't happen even if tomorrow Bush declared, "Screw you guys, we're going home." Phased withdrawal is a redundancy since any withdrawal of this scale would take place over the course of weeks and months, if only to account for security concerns. It's easy to plant IEDs and snipe at Americans when you know the roads all of them have to travel to leave: the alacrity with which we entered Iraq was due to fighting a mostly disappeared conventional army, not a ragtag, shadow-dwelling insurgency.

Anyway, worth a gander if only for hypothetical reasons:

It took three weeks to fight from Kuwait up to Baghdad, but that was with terrible weather and intense fighting. The withdrawal would likely go much faster, although it would hinge on two variables. The first is the pace set by military commanders for the move, who will likely choose something on a spectrum between rapid chaotic withdrawal and a slow, phased withdrawal over several months. The second variable is the "throughput" problem: Literally, how many of the 300,000 troops, civilians, and contractors in Iraq can squeeze through the airfields and seaports of Iraq and Kuwait to come home? Even if commanders dictate a rapid pullout, it may take weeks or months to bring everyone home from Kuwait and the Persian Gulf region.