Michael Schwartz on immediate withdrawal (certainly not premature)

(If you are going to Washington this weekend to demand immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, you would do well to take Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense By Michael Schwartz with you. It makes the case better than anything I have recently read.) Here's an excerpt from TomDispatch.com (where you can, of course, find the complete article, plus Tom's intro)

But where [staunch opponents of the war, such as Richard] Dreyfuss and [Juan] Cole are mistaken is in concluding that U.S. forces can be part of an effort "to prevent the outbreak of ... a catastrophic civil conflict." Despite the plausible logic of this argument, the U.S. presence doesn't deter, but contributes to, a thickening civil-war-like atmosphere in Iraq. It is always a dicey matter to project the present into the future, though that never stopped anybody from doing so. The future, by definition, is unknown and so open to the unexpected. Nonetheless, it is far more reasonable, based on what we now know, to assume that if the U.S. were to leave Iraq quickly, the level of violence would be reduced, possibly drastically, not heightened. Here are the four key reasons:
1. The U.S. military is already killing more civilian Iraqis than would likely die in any threatened civil war;
2. The U.S. presence is actually aggravating terrorist (Iraqi-on-Iraqi) violence, not suppressing it;
3. Much of the current terrorist violence would be likely to subside if the U.S. left;
4. The longer the U.S. stays, the more likely that scenarios involving an authentic civil war will prove accurate.

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