American withdrawal from Iraq now would be a disaster—for both Iraq and the U.S. It is unacceptable from a moral and humanitarian point of view, because far higher levels of violence than we have today, and probably civil war, would ensue. Pragmatically, unrestrained violence at the heart of the Middle East could do immense damage not only to American interests, but to everyone else's. Iraq would truly become, to quote Tom Friedman, "a Lebanon on steroids"—a conflict sucking in regional actors that would anyway, at some stage, likely demand an American return.