Juan Cole, professor of Middle East history, University of Michigan

MJ: What about the humanitarian implications if the U.S. withdraws?

JC: The U.N. thinks there are 2 million internally displaced and 2 million externally displaced Iraqi refugees, although about a million of the externals were displaced before the 2003 war. I think there are best-case scenarios and worst-case scenarios. The worst-case scenario would be Afghanistan in the 1990s after the Soviets withdrew. They're demographically the same size, about 25 million. There were 5 million externally displaced in Afghanistan and I think 4 million internally.

MJ: And the best-case scenario?

JC: The best-case scenario is an analogy to Lebanon where the Lebanese fought each other for awhile on ethnic and sectarian bases and then got tired of it and the big leaders came together and made peace. They hammered out a document they all could live with and went forward. That was the Taef Accord of 1989. The best-case scenario for Iraq is a kind of early Taef Accord. It's just the Baker plan, basically. Saudis and Iranians get together with Iraqi leaders, they forge a consensus among the leaders, the leaders are able to bring along the constituents, and they gradually start rebuilding and resolving the situation. In Lebanon one of the things that was necessary was adjusting the relative power of the Christians. An Iraq Taef Accord would probably have to readjust political power so that the Sunnis were over-represented beyond their demographic weight. The Shiites would have to give up some of their new overwhelming power.

MJ: What happens to the Iraqis who've been working with the United States if we leave?

JC: If the guerrillas can get a hold of them, they'll kill them.

MJ: Do you think the U.S would try to get some of these people out?

JC: So far the Bushies haven't done much about that sort of thing. I think the people will try to get out to Amman and Syria and there could be massacres along the way. If it looks like there are going to be massacres, then the hand of the U.S. might be forced just because it would be a public relations disaster to have done nothing. So far the Bush administration has been completely uninterested in helping those who've helped us.

MJ: Is there any aspect of withdrawal that no one's really considering?

JC: Most people underestimate the Sunni Arab forces in my view. They think, "Well, they're 20 percent of the population." But they punch way above their weight, because they were the officer corps, and the intelligence corps, and plus they have this enormous hinterland of support in the Gulf, Jordan, and Syria. I think the Sunni Arab guerrillas are going to benefit from a U.S. withdrawal in unexpected ways and that the Shiite militias may well be overwhelmed even in their strongholds by these guys. The other thing is we're having increasingly bad relations with the Shiite militias who had been our allies, more or less. There's been an alliance of convenience with the U.S., but the possibility that at the time we're withdrawing we're fighting a two-front war—it's very scary. There's a sense in which we're doing that now, but doing it as you withdraw won't be easy.

MJ: What's contributing to the bad relations with the Shiite militias?

JC: We're cracking down on them. Our conception of the surge politically is to give the monopoly on legitimate force to the central government, right? So the U.S. military is taking on both the Sunni Arab guerrillas and the Shiite militias in the hope of strengthening the central government. The difficultly of this is that the central government is extremely weak and its troops don't seem to me to have a prayer of standing up to the paramilitaries any time soon.

MJ: So you don't think Iraqi security forces are too much of a match for these other factions.

JC: It's another analogy to Vietnam. They really would be like the ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam]. Two things happened to ARVN: one, it was overwhelmed, and the other is that we found out that a lot of it was working for the other side.

MJ: So we can't count on their allegiances.

JC: I think that there would be some real potential for the army to split, or part of it, which came from the Shiite militia community, to go back to that and the Sunnis to join up with the Sunni guerrillas. The idea of the Iraqi government fighting effectively against sectarian militias and guerrillas just seems to me—I'm not saying it's impossible—awfully unlikely.

MJ: What's the best-case withdrawal plan?

JC: I've argued that the best hope for an orderly withdrawal would be to do whatever we can to set in place political structures that might survive our departure. The Sunni Arab provinces never had proper provincial elections, so the governments in those provinces are unrepresentative. In some cases, as with Diyala, you basically have a fairly radical Shiite government ruling a province that's 60 percent Sunni. You know there are going to be problems with that because the government then appoints the police, and so forth. I think we should be trying to hold provincial elections before we leave so that the provincial governments and their police actually represent local, real political forces and therefore might have some chance of surviving and not just collapsing when we go.

MJ: Is a withdrawal likely in the near term?

JC: No. I think the Bush administration will be under very significant pressure from the Republican National Committee not to sink the party in '08, so there may be some for-show withdrawals. For instance, you could take the 30,000 extra that were put in for the surge out and then claim that it is a substantial drawdown. But then you'd be back to December 2006 troop levels. I don't expect there to be a significant troop withdrawal until this president is out of office.

MJ: And then I suppose it would depend on who's elected after that.

JC: No. We're going home. It doesn't matter who's president. Nobody's gonna want this albatross around their necks as they go in. Whoever gets elected wants a second term, right? They're not going to get one that way. So I'd say summer '09; that's when I expect a very big withdrawal. And I expect all hell to break loose in the wake of that. The warring political cells are going to attempt to take over the country when we're not the umpires anymore.