Exit Iraq?

Its official: Withdrawal or disengagement as the bureacrats and spin-doctors are sure to call it is just around the corner! Withdrawal is the right thing to do for innumerable reasons. Here are just two:
1) American citizens are getting killed over a conflict for Iraq....there is no Iraq, there are, in fact, at least three states (Sunni, Shia and Kurdish) and further fractures along these bigger fault lines. For a great debate on the partitioning of Iraq, see Peter W. Galbraith's debate on the The New Republic's site. Galbraith is the first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia and the author of the book, The End of Iraq: How American Competence Created a War Without End. Galbraith debates Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an advisor to the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Survey Group.
2) It's costing American taxpayers and eventually the current debts will come home to roost in an awful way, which inturn will be sure to effect the world economy. But don't take my word for it. Everyone who's anyone is suggesting a withdrawal of some sort:

Fareed Zakaria writing for Newsweek: November 6, 2006

But today, more than three years into the American-led invasion of Iraq, there is little question that we stand at, well, a critical moment. The policy we are pursuing—maintaining 144,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and hoping that things improve—is not sustainable either in Iraq or in America. President Bush has three tools at his disposal that he can (theoretically) apply to the mission at hand—more troops, money and time. At this point, none of these will make much difference.

Robert Kaplan writing on The Atlantics website: October 22, 2006

What we will not be able to manage is a genocide, mainly of the Sunnis, that we alone will be seen as responsible for. Any withdrawal—with all of its military, diplomatic, economic aid, and emergency relief aid aspects—has to be as meticulously planned-out as our occupation wasn't. Staying the course may be a dead end. But don't think for a moment that "redeploying" is any less risky than invading.

The Economist should be called The Optimist. They are still holding out for a (no, not a victory or even a positive outcome, but) "a more stable trajectory." Nevertheless, implicit in this argument is the idea of the end game.

For the politicians (and newspapers, like ours) who argued strongly for the invasion of Iraq, it is no longer enough to accuse those who want to head for the exit of “cutting and running”, as if using a pejorative phrase settled the argument either way. Cutting your losses is sometimes the sensible thing to do, even for a superpower, and even after paying a heavy price in lost lives and wasted money. If you genuinely believe, as many people now do, that the likeliest long-term outcome in Iraq is that America will end up cutting and running anyway, with no improvement to be expected even three or four years hence, why simply postpone the inevitable?
Because failure may not be inevitable.

Even Henry Kissinger's recent article at The Washinton Post's site entitled, "Lessons for an Exit Strategy," is trying to see its way to the exit sign:

American strategy, including a withdrawal process, will stand or fall not on whether it maintains the existing security situation but on whether the capacity to improve it is enhanced. Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.