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The Surrender Solution

The December issue of the Atlantic Monthly features a "Hypothetical" essay entitled "If America Left Iraq: The case for cutting and running." The author is Nir Rosen, a freelance journalist who over the last year or so has published a series of long, meticulously reported examinations of the Iraqi insurgency in au courant journals like the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. Rosen's journalism is noteworthy, the editors of the Atlantic inform us, because he "speaks Arabic" and "has spent 16 months in Iraq," mostly "among ordinary Iraqis." That, and he probably has more sources in the insurgency than any other American reporter.

And those sources, incredibly, have led him to the following insight: "If the occupation were to end," Rosen writes, "so, too, would the insurgency." Because, "after all," the "resistance movement" is "resisting" the "occupation." And if there were no "occupation" . . . well, "who would the insurgents fight"? Q.E.D.

Say what you will, this Zen-koan approach to geopolitics struck us as pretty original. Yet it turns out "If America Left Iraq" is merely a shorter, better-edited version of a September 21 "outside view" article Rosen penned for UPI entitled "The Small, Daily Abu Ghraibs." The opinions expressed in this article "are not," Rosen assures, "the ramblings of a leftwing polemicist." And he's right. They are something more sinister.

"I spent about a year and a half in Iraq," Rosen writes, and "it was obvious early on, and continues to be, that the main problem in Iraq, the main obstacle to progress, is the U.S. occupation." Cue ridiculous tautology: "When it ends, attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq will end as well."

What is more, Rosen continues, all of this is "true worldwide as well":