America will eventually withdraw from Iraq, though it is difficult to say when and under what conditions (though the most likely scenario, imho, is establishment of a permanent US presence in the Kurdish region and withdrawal from the rest of Iraq).
After the American withdrawal? As the history of the Korean and Vietnam Wars shows*, leftists in the USA are not only too few to compel the US government to pay reparations to the Iraqi people but incapable of stopping it from economically sanctioning a post-war Iraqi government, unless Washington, against all odds, manages to leave behind an enduring pro-Washington government like the governments of the Gulf states.
In the worst case scenario, Iraq after US withdrawal will have a long civil war, lasting for several decades, and then perhaps one of its neighbors, most likely Iran, will sponsor a sectarian Shi'i Islamist movement that manages to impose law and order on much of Iraq, as Pakistan did with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In the best case scenario, Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, finding nationalist allies among Sunnis, Kurds, and others, will set up a nationalist Islamist government, with support from all or most of Iraq's neighbors.
Either way, or any other way, the resulting government is unlikely to please Washington, or liberals and leftists in the USA for that matter. Then, far from paying reparations to the Iraqis, Washington will impose economic sanctions on it, citing human rights violations that will no doubt abound in the country for a long time to come. Liberals and leftists in the USA are unlikely to sway the public against such sanctions -- many liberals and some leftists will probably favor them, in fact.
* Since everyone knows the post-war US-Korean and US-Vietnam relations, it is astonishing that anyone liberal, let alone leftist, bought the "Pottery Barn" rule**, but many subscribed to it for too long, insisting that the US cannot withdraw until it reconstructs Iraq.
** <blockquote>Colin Powell invoked it before the invasion, telling aides that if the US went into Iraq "you're going to be owning this place". John Kerry pledged his allegiance to it during the first presidential debate, saying: "Now, if you break it, you made a mistake. It's the wrong thing to do. But you own it."
It's the so-called Pottery Barn rule: "You break it, you own it." Pottery Barn, a chain of stores that sells upmarket home furnishings in shopping malls across America, apparently has an in-store policy that if you shatter anything while shopping, you have to pay for it, because "you own it".
In US foreign policy, this little dictate has come to wield more influence than the Geneva conventions and the US army's law of land warfare combined - except it turns out that the rule doesn't even exist. "In the rare instance that something is broken in the store, it's written off as a loss," an exasperated company spokesperson recently told a journalist. (Naomi Klein, "No, You Don't Own It," 28 December 2004, <http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6930>)</blockquote>
Note that Klein had to write this as late as December 2004! -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>