What are the risks of withdrawing coalition forces?
Some U.S. leaders have worried that a coalition pullout from Iraq might trigger a Vietnam-style “domino effect” in which multiple countries are toppled or the region is plunged into chaos. For example, Former President Bush warned in his 2007 State of the Union Address that America’s enemies “want to overthrow moderate governments, and establish safe havens from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country… A contagion of violence could spill out across [Iraq] and in time, the entire region could be drawn into the conflict.”8 Yet the dominoes never fell after the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, and the best available evidence suggests that the presence of coalition forces is increasing violence rather than decreasing it. Indeed, before the Iraq War there had not been a single documented case of a suicide bombing, and the level of sectarian violence and terrorism was far lower than it is today, both within Iraq and globally.9 When a 2007 BBC polled asked Iraqis whether the prese
