Driving to work today, I caught a few minutes of cut-and-run advocate Lawrence Korb on C-SPAN radio. A few minutes was all it took for Korb to refute his own argument.
Korb and the left-wing think tank for whom he works are advocating that the U.S. pull out of Iraq by the end of 2007 regardless of what happens between now and then. He claims that by leaving Iraq we can reduce the violence there because the current violence is largely due to the resentment of Iraqis over our presence.
This narcissistic “blame America first” view assumes that those committing the violence in Iraq have no important motives for killing other than dislike and distrust of America. Yet within minutes, Korb was arguing that the recent sectarian violence was the result of Shiites seeking revenge for events that took place when the Sunnis were in control.
In other words, there are important reasons why Iraqis would kill one another that have nothing to do with our presence and that would persist if we were to leave. And revenge is hardly the only one. Lust for power is another. So is the desire of the most lethal elements of the terrorist insurgency to create a base from which to spread terror beyond Iraqi borders.
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