Withdrawing from Iraq in 18 months

The Jan/Feb 2006 Boston Review has a New Democracy Forum on the Iraq War, called Exit Strategy.

In the lead article to which the others respond, Barry Posen of MIT advocates an 18-month timetable for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, with the assumption that the US will still militarily guarantee Iraq's external security:

The Bush administration believes that to accomplish its goals, the U.S. military must stay in Iraq, continuing to build its vaguely stated model of a Middle Eastern democracy. In this view, the current stalemate can be broken by steady and achievable improvements in the administration of Iraq, ever more representative and inclusive political institutions, and significant increases in the size and quality of Iraq's security forces - all of which have proved elusive.

But the expectation of an open-ended American presence lends internal and external political support to the insurgents and infantilizes the government and army of Iraq, producing at best a perpetual stalemate. The Bush administration's plan is to hang on and hope for a lucky break, or at least hope to make it to the end of the president's second term without an obvious catastrophe. Meanwhile the steady grind of rotations to Iraq will cause good soldiers and officers to quietly exit the Army and prospective recruits to decline entry. The American public may look up in three years and find that the option of staying the course is gone, and the conditions for departure much less controllable. Surely the steady drumbeat of American casualties combined with the gap between the political progress claimed by administration spinners and the actual state of relations between the Sunni, the Shia, and the Kurds will erode public support for any enduring commitment to Iraq. Then the strategy that both the Bush administration's mainstream supporters and its mainstream critics fear the most may be the only one available - precipitous withdrawal. The United States must try another strategy while it still has the political and military resources necessary to influence the pattern of disengagement and the aftermath. (my emphasis)