Iraq

Quickly.

The U.S. presence in Iraq is destabilizing.

There are numerous reasons for this. The first is the strategy of providing arms and training to people whose interests and loyalties are not primarily toward creating stability.

The second is that you don't promote stability by enraging people, crashing into their homes, humiliating them, insulting them, and killing off their family members seemingly at random. Terror can make a terrible stability, applied systematically. Where there is no system, it just feeds the engine of chaos.

But most fundamentally, everyone knows that change is coming. Eventually, people need to sit down and agree on an outcome of this conflict that will be seen as legitimate by enough people for it to stick. But if change is in the air, that generally means that at least one group will believe it could be the beneficiary of that change. And all you need is one bellicose group at any given time to sustain perpetual conflict. The US stayed in Iraq this long by constantly seeing each new anticipated development as the potential light at the end of the tunnel. Why go when victory is just up this way and a little to the left? Iraqis who are still in the fight are called forward by similar perceptions of promise. They will keep fighting so long as there is a short-run prospect that the US will leave or shift in its actions or allies.

Leave and this disappears. There will be an explosion and then a sit down. The longer the US waits, the bigger the explosion will be and the harder the sit down will be.