Andrew Sullivan makes the perfectly reasonable point that Iraq is not South Korea, or Japan, or Germany. He says that if American forces could stay in those countries for 100 years, the same may not be true of Iraq, a country at the heart of a Muslim world:
There is no way an Arab Muslim country will tolerate Western troops permanently based on their land - without constant war and threat of war. To believe otherwise is to engage in a "holiday from reality." We've done enough of that. The future of a permanently occupied Iraq is less likely to be Japan than the West Bank. And the deeper we are stuck there, the more our predicament will become the awful, morally corrosive, soul-sapping experience of the occupying Israelis.
There's only one problem with this analogy--it, too, ignores reality. Despite all the settlements in the West Bank, there is a broad consensus in Israel that occupation is a disaster, that it must be ended, that it is, as Andrew says, morally corrosive. And yet they do not leave the West Bank. Why? Because they left Gaza, and Hamas took over. Because the left Southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah took over. Because they face daily rocket fire from Gaza in the south, and have only temporarily suppressed the threat from the north following the costly reinvasion of Southern Lebanon in 2006. Again, it's an entirely fair point to say that occupation is bad, and that there are differences between Japan and Iraq. But one must also examine how those differences will manifest themselves in the wake of a withdrawal. If the future of an occupied Iraq is less likely to be Japan than the West Bank, Sullivan needs to explain why a future withdrawal is less likely to be Gaza than Vietnam. Because I don't think anyone, on the left or right, would be willing to tolerate an Iraq that was run by al Qaeda as Gaza is now run by Hamas. And while the Israelis can reinvade Gaza with relative ease--as they are almost sure to do in the next several months--the United States cannot just walk back into Iraq.