What ethical principles should be considered in deciding what to do next?
You have some people who say stay the course — the Pottery Barn analogy, “you break it, you own it,” and that’s an awful analogy. We don’t own any country. What that says is essentially we can’t admit a mistake, and we can’t pull out; we’ve got to stay there until we fix it. Another option would be to escalate. Senator John McCain says we need several hundred thousand more troops on the ground to really fix it, to fulfill our moral requirements. I say we really need to withdraw. The truth is there are really going to be no happy, perfect outcomes, given what we have done in Iraq and what’s happened in the first three years of this war. There is going to be no scenario where everybody’s going to be happy and peace instantly breaks out. Having said that, withdrawal can mean a number of different things. It can mean partitioning the country between the three major factions and bringing in international entities, multilateral entities to supervise that transition, or it can mean unilatera
