That bit of Goldfarbian idiocy below was prompted by reaction to this bit of Max Boot foolishness*:

Just as Islamist militants were emboldened by the Soviet Union’s retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, so they would be encouraged by our premature departure from Iraq.

As Yglesias notes, what happened after the withdrawal is fairly relevant.  Yes, Bin Laden boasted about the withdrawal of the Soviets, so what did he do?  Within the space of a few years, he had decided that it was time to start targeting…the main Western patron of the mujahideen!  That sure showed Moscow what was what.  Of course, the reasons he gave for doing this were related to the presence of U.S. forces in his home country and he used that presence to rally supporters behind him, just as today he and his ilk use the ongoing occupation of Iraq to rally support to their cause.  So it is not really all that obvious that the answer is therefore to occupy Iraq indefinitely.

P.S.  Yglesias writes in response to Boot:

But to argue that Mikhail Gorbachev should have continued the occupation of Afghanistan indefinitely in order to prevent a terrorist attack in Manhattan twelve years later is absurd.

That is absurd, but slightly less absurd than Goldfarb’s implication that Gorbachev should have continued the occupation of Afghanistan indefinitely to prevent terrorist attacks committed by people completely unrelated to the war in Afghanistan.

* I should add that it is the entire op-ed that is foolish, and not necessarily this particular line.