Actually withdrawal will take longer than going in, tactically speaking. Force protection in unresolved conflict is almost impossible with immediate withdrawal. It would have to go in stages, otherwise you’d experience significant casualties as your forces depart. And that’s before you take into account the logistics of removing all the equipment we brought with us. A realistic withdrawal would likely take several months to implement, which is why I opted for “as soon as safely possible”.

See ya beat it.

Enter into negotiations with Iran,Turkey, Syria, and other bordering states to try to establish ground rules concerning interventions and border clashes.

I don’t see how anyone in the libertarian community can be in favor of staying in Iraq. Who said, “War is the health of the state.”? We need to leave for the defense of OUR liberty. We have no ability whatsoever to bring liberty to other people.

What some seem not to understand is that you cannot force people to get along. Trying to form a unitary government with the ethnic divisions in Iraq is foolish – it has never worked, and will never work. The Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds have been fighting each other for centuries now. Who is silly enough to expect that because the United States showed up, deposed their dictator, and provided 4+ years of policing, that the hatred between these three groups of different ideologies and ethnicities will simply disappear? Ours is a fool’s errand, and the best thing to do is remove ourselves from their civil war.

The Bush administration cannot fix this…they’ve proven conclusively that they’re fucking incompetent. And Petraeus cannot fix this because he’s not the one determining policy or strategy…Bush is. Quit pretending that any of this is going to change, accept that A is A, and quit waiting for Bush to become something he clearly isn’t.

And make no mistake, this bloodshed would have taken place once Saddam died or left power anyway. He was the only thing holding that schizoid country together…the minute he was gone civil war would have been the result. All we did was speed up the inevitable process, we didn’t cause it.

And then when you consider how hard the administration has fought to avoid giving us any consisten numbers by which to measure progress, I’m not very optimistic that we’re making progress. At some point you have to stop trying to push water uphill.

The problem is in five years they have very little infrastucture rebuilt, in some places they have electricity for only a few hours a day. The oil is still only dripping, not flowing. We have done very little in fixing or rebuilding what we destroyed. That should have been the first thing we put our attention to. The problem is our military is very good at destroying things, but not putting them back to together. At this pace we could stay there fifty years and things still would not be rebuilt.

Besides, the everybody but the Kurds really want us to leave right now, and if it’s any indication of poorly we and the Iraqi government are managing the country. I have no doubt that civil war will break out in Iraq, but there is no sense in the United States army standing in between two factions firing bullets at eat other.