Actually, I think the more likely ending to that is we end up abandoning it all in a couple of years when we withdraw. I don’t doubt that Bush is attempting to make the war something so intractable that his successor won’t be able to remove us, but I think the end result will still be us leaving and cutting our losses (meaning we leave everything we’ve built to the Iraqis). The end of the war is inevitable, but it won’t end with a stable Iraqi government. It’ll end because we finally decide that we’re okay with letting the Iraqis kill each other as long as it means no more troop deaths. We’ll never be able to sustain a 20-50 year commitment there. The Iraqis won’t tolerate it, the volunteer military won’t survive it, and our economy will eventually worsen and turn the American people against it. All building these bases and the embassy does is hasten the rot.

14 air bases, huge militarized embassy, guaranteed garrison. this needs to be repeat over and over and over.

if the pentagon plans for an empire, they should just come out and tell the american people and lay out plainly their justification for empire and then tell the american the expected repercussions of this.

I agree with what you said, although I’m not going to be as optimistic as you about the chances for a less-violent resolution (it’s going to get very, very wet over there). But I do think that the longer we stay the bloodier the conflict’s eventually going to be, so leaving sooner rather than later is preferrable. And neither side is one we particularly want to back anyway.

Wake up, Doug! We’re going to cut and run in Iraq. The only question is when and under what circumstances. Furthermore, there can be no settlement among the Iraqis as long as U.S. troops are there. As long as we support the Shiites, they will dig in and make demands that the Sunnis won’t meet. If we try to shift our support to the Sunnis, we will make a mockery of our claims to be building a “democratic” Iraq, and anyway, the Shiites might then very well ask us to leave.

So we might as well get out and let the Iraqis solve the problem among themselves. That might require a great deal of violence. But we could be surprised to find that it doesn’t really require that much.

That is precisely NOT Paul’s problem. His problem is that he has too many positions on esoteric issues like the gold standard or abolishing the Federal Reserve that the people don’t understand and are therefore distrustful of. He therefore comes across as impractical. Paul needs to focus on a few major issues and none more than the war in Iraq.

I suspect that his broken record on Iraq was a deliberate policy. With Iowa and New Hampshire being the first two key races and with both being anti-war, Paul needs to do everything he can to establish his position on that issue and he doesn’t need to get bogged down in having to defend himself on some other issue, especially one of the esoteric ones.

And if you want to understand why what we’re doing in Iraq is doomed, here’s a link to the manual on counterinsurgency that General Petraeus wrote:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf

This is the manual that Bush continually cites as proof that Petraeus can win the war. Read it, compare it to what’s going on in Iraq now, crunch the numbers (particularly the troops to population ratios), study the requirements for winning a counterinsurgency, then come back and tell me that Iraq possesses anything close to what the characteristics Petraeus says he needs for successful resolution of this war. I think you’ll find that Bush’s optimism is false and utterly groundless.

In addition, I’d also recommend this book, upon which Petraeus based many of his conclusions:

http://www.amazon.com/Pacification-Algeria-1956-1958-David-Galula/dp/0833039202/ref=sr_1_4/102-5077039-1621747?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193079238&sr=8-4

Why would you say that? Something on the order of $12 billion a week is being spent on the Iraq war alone. We need that money. We have a massive unfunded liability in SS and Medicare, and it’s either cut spending, raise taxes, or borrow/print money. Only one of those options won’t decimate the American economy.

And Iraq’s linked to the entitlements because it’s part of the same neo-conservative philosophy of increased statism, and they’re both contributing to an impending economic crisis. I don’t think they’re as directly linked as rho suggests, but they are linked by the underlying philosophy that created them.

IMF chief warns dollar may suffer ‘abrupt fall’

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=071022154152.yz1uni1v&show_article=1

Bravo !

We’re not going to leave a stable country behind no matter who gets elected or what they do. That ship sailed after Bush committed to sending too few troops, disbanded the Iraqi military, and uprooted the entire societal order with de-Ba’athification. Iraq is a creation of colonial days ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Mandate_of_Mesopotamia ), it’s an artificial construct that the people no longer appear to want, and the only thing that held that country together was the sheer brutality of Saddam Hussein’s rule. It’s breaking apart now because it was never a unified country to begin with (a process which Bush sped along, but didn’t create). All we’re doing by leaving our troops there is getting them killed to try and stop an inevitability…the breakup of Iraq. And to save face (which is also the reason Bush still insists on fighting a war where he doesn’t have sufficient resources to proceed). The war’s a lost cause, Doug, one that we never should have been involved with in the first place.

We have a massive financial obligation staring us in the face with SS and Medicare. It will cripple the government if we are also trying to finance an expensive global empire. We simply cannot do both. It can’t be done. Period.

So, you have to end the war. You have to bring our troops home and turn our foreign policy back to where we do as little as possible outside of (cheap) diplomacy.

Ending the Iraq War tomorrow will do nothing whatsoever to solve the entitlements mess. Believing that it will is as bad as Democrats who believe we can tax our way out of the crisis.

Paul was right in that continuing the war now is just about saving face, but it’s not just the politicians that are doing it and I think it’ll work against him in this campaign if he constantly reminds the voters of the fact that they were overwhelming behind the war originally.

I don’t know about that. Cutting and running at this point, without at least making a semblance of an effort of leaving a stable country behind, is going to cause problems in the future that we will, by default, be required to deal with.