We've always had an exit strategy in Iraq. It's called victory, defined as having a democratically-elected government (check) with an economy that can support the ongoing police war against die-hard Saddamists, foreign jihadis, and sectarian assholes (almost there) and a security forces that can conduct that war without the current large American presence. What we did in Germany, Japan, and Korea, basically, even if it's taken the ROKs almost fifty years to get the democracy thing right.

The Economist article is talking about the long-term, and they hedge more than a mutual fund adviser. Show me some bad statistics about now or the near-term.