http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/23/1321214JUAN COLE: Right, well, I believe that the issues so far has been put in too simplistic a manner. People are saying, well, troops out now or U.S. out now, or we have to stay the course. And it seems to me that we have lots of options besides those two things, both of which, I think, are very dangerous. So, first of all, we learned from Kosovo and Afghanistan that you can accomplish a very great deal by giving close air support to an ally on the ground. So, I agree that U.S. troops should come out of Iraq. First, I think they should come out of the cities, and then ultimately I'd like to see ground forces withdrawn in the main.
And the danger in doing that, of course, is -- and all of my Iraqi friends unanimously insist that if were U.S. troops to withdraw precipitately, there would be a civil war amongst the Sunni Arabs, the Shiites and the Kurds. But it seems to me that could be prevented by giving close air support to the new Iraqi army and to other allied forces on the ground. And I was in Lebanon during the civil war. I have seen what a civil war really is. What's going on in Iraq right now is not really a civil war. It's a kind of low intensity conflict, but in a civil war, you have militias mounting set-piece battles, 2,000 guys on each side, and firing mortars and shooting at one another. And the U.S. could use its air power to prevent that kind of a large scale civil war in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal. ....more