Symptoms of Withdrawal

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That's hard to say. The insurgents have been able to feed off the dislike most Iraqis have for the occupation. "The slow withdrawal of U.S. forces should eat away an important part of the insurgents' support base" and diminish their strength, predicts Seth Jones, an Iraq analyst at the Rand Corp. who advises the Pentagon. Many Sunni Arabs who boycotted Iraq's elections last January appear genuinely interested in participating in the Dec. 15 vote, while Iraqi nationalists and former regime members active in the insurgency are signaling an interest in forming political parties rather than in continuing armed jihad. At the Cairo meeting, Iraqi leaders even indicated a willingness to cut deals with insurgents to bring them into the political process.

But the CIA has been pessimistic about the likelihood of peace breaking out as U.S. troops leave. Allies in the region believe that a U.S. withdrawal would suck the steam out of the insurgency, but it may already be too late to prevent the breakup of Iraq. Some Saudi officials don't believe the situation is salvageable, says Nawaf Obaid, director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, which has prepared a classified study of Iraq for the Riyadh government. "As much as the Americans are trying to put a positive face on it," says Obaid, "it is highly unlikely that Iraq will emerge as a unified state."

Although the U.S. is making progress in training Iraqi units to fight on their own, there is growing evidence that many Iraqi soldiers are more loyal to religious or ethnic factions than to the central government. Sunni Arabs are worried that the new Iraqi army and the Interior Ministry's security forces are infiltrated by partisan Shi'ite and Kurdish militias who target Sunnis for reprisals--a fear that gained credence this month with the discovery of 173 mostly Sunni detainees in an Interior Ministry building who were malnourished and in some cases showed signs of torture. "If the Iraqi security forces the Americans leave behind increasingly are identified as anti-Sunni, we're replacing one occupation with another," says Jeffrey White, a defense analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Will the region be better off if the U.S. withdraws?

Yes--if the U.S. leaves behind a unified and democratic Iraq (two big ifs). Such an outcome would also improve Washington's tarnished image in the Middle East. Although most of the nearby governments believe toppling Saddam Hussein was good for Iraq and the region, the Arab world has almost universally condemned the U.S. invasion. Beyond that, many local leaders believe that the war has fueled terrorism in the region, as in the recent triple suicide bombing in Amman, Jordan. "You have ended up with a great big area--from the Jordanian border to the outskirts of Baghdad--being a lawless and terror-infested territory," says Ali Shukri, a former adviser to Jordan's King Hussein.