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Two Ways OutIraq plans Bush won't consider, but his successor should.

By Fred KaplanPosted Monday, April 9, 2007, at 6:22 PM ET

Two new essays on how to disengage from Iraq are making the rounds, and though they hail from very different quarters (one, by Steven Simon, is published by the Council on Foreign Relations; the other, by Juan Cole, appears in the Nation), their conclusions are strikingly similar.

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They both reject the Bush administration's stay-the-course surge and the congressional Democrats' insistence on a fixed timetable for withdrawal.

And they're also both utterly unlikely to receive the slightest attention from President George W. Bush.

In short, it seems, we're all stuck in a holding pattern, doomed to mere "muddling through," until somebody else sets up shop in the White House on Jan. 20, 2009—an unbelievable 651 days of mayhem to go.

The showdown over the emergency-spending bill—to which the House and Senate have attached requirements for troop withdrawals—isn't likely to settle matters. Bush's recent recess appointments of nominees that the Senate had been on the verge of rejecting—most notably Sam Fox, who heavily funded the Swift Boat Veterans in the 2004 presidential elections, as the new ambassador to Belgium—is a blatant signal that he has no interest in compromising with what he and Vice President Dick Cheney see as interlopers of executive authority. And over the weekend, key Democrats conceded that if Bush vetoed the bill, they'd drop their withdrawal clause rather than let the money for troops run out. (The concession merely acknowledged reality, but conceding so quickly surrenders whatever bargaining power they might have possessed.)

So, the $93 billion in emergency spending for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will likely go forth with no strings attached.

The vast majority of Congress doesn't really want to impose a strict deadline for withdrawing most of the troops; the Democratic leadership went that route because it conformed to the one power that Congress has in these matters, the power of the purse. Most Democrats were trying to pressure the president into recognizing that his strategy isn't working and to link America's military commitment to some set of political benchmarks or conditions on the part of the Iraqis.

But George W. Bush has said over and over—and it's past time people realize that he generally does believe what he says—that he's not interested in attaching any conditions to his military commitment. (In the minds of Bush and Cheney, when it comes to war powers, the president is America.) He knows that he's right on Iraq, that History is on his side—end of discussion.

So, let's turn to the two withdrawal proposals with the longer-term aim of encouraging Bush's aspiring successors to look them over and think about adopting them as policy immediately upon entering the Oval Office.

Simon, a Middle East specialist and former National Security Council official, and Cole, professor of Middle East studies at the University of Michigan, have three common premises. First, the surge and the new counterinsurgency strategy almost certainly won't work, in part because the war is not just an insurgency war but also a civil war involving three sects (and divisions within those sects) against one another. Second, the U.S. occupation strengthens the insurgents and broadens their support at least as much as it weakens or isolates them.

However, third, they also emphasize that real hell would break out if U.S. forces suddenly or arbitrarily withdrew. Cole, while fiercely critical of Bush's policies on Iraq and much else, has long been adamant on this point—that there are degrees of civil war and Iraq hasn't begun to approach the full boil that an unconditional pullout might ignite.