No one working on an Iraq exit plan as civil war grows more likely

Stunning as it may seem, over the past few weeks I’ve surveyed leading think tanks in New York and Washington and talked to former State Department and CIA officials, and it appears that virtually no one is working on a real plan for an exit strategy. Still, such utter inaction can’t continue, either among the foreign policy elite or within the State Department itself. Pressure to get out is growing—and not just from the left.

In a surprising opinion piece called “Iraq Exit,” Donald Devine of the American Conservative Union, an ultra-conservative outfit, wrote: “The only solution is for the U.S. to exit before the whole thing comes apart. … That has been the continuing logic of positioning American troops to more isolated outposts and leaving the police work to the Iraqis, flexibly withdrawing U.S. soldiers after the next election one way or another turns power to the Iraqis to work out their own destinies.”