Patrick Buchanan's antiwar American Conservative magazine takes an even harder line. In the current cover story, author Christopher Layne argues that neither internationalization nor increasing troop strength will work, and that simply withdrawing is the least bad of several bad options. In a piece that is virtually indistinguishable from a left-wing antiwar screed, Layne says, "the time has come for a statesman to step forward and ask the American people the question that must be asked: if the United States remains in Iraq, how do we tell the U.S. troops there that one of them will be the last one to die for a mistake?"

Meanwhile, Greg Mitchell, editor of the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, recently wrote a column titled, "When Will the First Major Newspaper Call for a Pullout in Iraq?" "Are you ready, now, to think the unthinkable?" he asked his readers, many of whom work in the media industry. "Who will be the first in line to call for a phased withdrawal, not more troops? As with Vietnam, one brave voice (remember Walter Cronkite on Feb. 27, 1968) may inspire others."

Of course, different people mean different things when they call for withdrawal from Iraq. Some, like Layne, would pull out immediately and let Iraqis work (or fight) out the future of their country among themselves. Several on the right, including Daniel Pipes, once a proponent of the notion that a reformed Iraq would spread democratic values throughout the benighted Middle East, are now calling for the administration to appoint a pliable strongman to hold Iraq in check.

Liberals like Galbraith are more concerned with what the Iraqis themselves want -- to that end, he proposes a three-state solution, with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds running independent republics united in a loose federation. "In my view, Iraq is not salvageable as a unitary state," he writes.

On May 6, the Nation published a forum called "How to Get Out of Iraq," with contributions from people including lefty luminaries Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, Ray Close, the former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at Princeton University.

Most call for some kind of international body to manage the transfer to Iraqi sovereignty and to provide security in the country. John Kerry has also promised to involve other nations in Iraq's reconstruction, and in some ways their plans resemble his, with one crucial difference -- while calling for U.N. involvement, Kerry has also suggested that more U.S. troops be sent to stabilize the country. The Nation writers, though, largely argue that American troops need to leave Iraq to others untainted by the botched occupation.

The most intriguing plan in the Nation comes from John Brady Kiesling, the diplomat who resigned last February to protest Bush's foreign policy. He suggests that America essentially stage its own defeat, allowing a designated Iraqi to reap the glory of driving the occupation from the country.

"A victorious Secretary Rumsfeld could not impose Ahmad Chalabi. However, a retreating US military can designate Iraq's liberator," writes Kiesling. "We must select the competent Iraqi patriot to whom we yield ground while bleeding his competitors. There will be casualties and disorder, no matter how brilliantly we orchestrate our withdrawal. But the overwhelming majority of Iraqis will rally around any man who claims to drive us out, and elections would validate his relatively bloodless victory."

If the plans of liberals and conservatives differ on details, they share the conviction that the presence of American troops in Iraq is causing more problems than it solves. "Washington's real choice is akin to that posed in an old oil-filter commercial that used to run on television," writes Layne. "America can pay now, or it can pay later when the costs will be even higher."

Critics argue that advocates of withdrawal fail to adequately appreciate what's at stake if America is defeated in Iraq. "There are only a handful of folks who are advocating that who have dealt honestly with the costs associated with it," says Feaver. "There's a lot of loose talk -- 'we cut and ran from Vietnam and we still won the Cold War.' That kind of analysis is very shallow and ahistorical."

Feaver invokes the "paper tiger" argument to justify staying in Iraq. "The costs of cutting and running is reinforcing the idea that you don't have to defeat American military power, you just have to make life unpleasant and kill enough Americans and you will break American will," he says. "That's the premise behind bin Laden's grand strategy against the U.S. It's quite serious."

Feaver also argues that a U.S. pullout could turn Iraq into even more of a terrorist haven than it's become since the war. "Afghanistan proves we have a vital interest in not letting a state become a failed state hijacked by terrorist organizations, and some vision of the future of Iraq might be that," says Feaver. "Just taking our troops and going home, that would produce as many costs to us as staying."

And if Iraq descends into a civil war, U.S. troops would be forced to return, he says. "It's worth remembering the civil war in Yugoslavia," Feaver says. "We couldn't stay out of it. The people who advocate cutting and running, I'm not sure how they think we can avoid getting involved in civil war in Iraq. If Yugoslavia disappears from the international economy, that's one thing. If the Persian Gulf disappears from the international economy, that's quite another."

Proponents of pulling out, though, say that it's foolish to ask Americans to die in the attempt to stop a bad situation from getting worse if there's also no prospect of it improving. "There's no credible evidence that things will get better the longer we stay," says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for foreign policy and defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute and an advocate of rapid withdrawal.

Advocates of withdrawal scoff at both the paper tiger and the terrorist-haven argument, saying that we are creating more terrorists by remaining in Iraq than we would if we left.

Pulling out, he says, "will damage our credibility, but the damage is likely to be less than if we stumble out of Iraq years from now having lost thousands of troops with a mission in obvious failure. In many ways Lyndon Johnson faced the same choice in late 1964-early 1965 -- either escalate the commitment in Vietnam or terminate the mission realizing it is at least a partial failure. He escalated. What he did was turn a foreign policy setback into an absolute debacle. I'm really afraid if we try and stay in Iraq, we're going to end up the same way."

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