Dugger

1) Sunnis fighting the US and the Iraqi government
2) Sunnis and Shi’ites killing each other (the corpse war)
3) Religious extremists (both Shi’ite and Sunni) murdering the “un-Islamic”
4) Intra-Shi’ite war in Basra, that has now turned agains the British
5) The North - Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs fighting over Kirkuk. (this is the lowest grade part of the war, but has the potential to be genocidal)

What exactly are US troops doing right now? Conducting periodic high-profile raids against Sunni insurgent strongholds. And standing guard lest the Sunni insurgents start driving around in tanks. For all the talk of “clear-hold-build”, we aren’t doing much of it. BTW, this is a paraphrase of Frederick Kagan’s recent piece in the Weekly Standard. NOBODY thinks clear-hold-build is working right now.

So does it make sense for US troops to continue what they’re doing? Hawks like Kagan think we should conduct a massive roll-em-up campaign against the entire Sunni triangle. But he openly discounts the other 4 parts of the Iraqi civil war, meaning that the situation will hardly improve if we replicate Fallujah throughout central Iraq. Can we really pacify Baghdad that way?

If we keep on the status quo, the five elements of the Iraq war will continue to escalate according to their own logic. We may prevent the appearance of insurgent tanks on the streets of Baghdad, but we can’t prevent wanton summary executions of government workers.

But what happens if we pull out, say, in a one-year phased withdrawal? Is anybody ready to keep order? The insurgency against the US will end, but the insurgency against the Shi’ite dominated government won’t. Nor will the other 4 parts of the war. Will the five-part war just escalate that much faster, now that the US lid has been removed from the pot? Redeploying to Kuwait a la the Murtha plan might actually give us the worst of both worlds. The war immediately escalates out of control, and we find ourselves constantly drawn back in to stop a genocide. So do we just pull out permanently and let the forces fight it out to whatever logical and bloody conclusion awaits? I have no idea. But if we are going to talk seriously about pulling out - and we should have that conversation because the current plan is such a disaster, and the more hawkish plans like Kagan’s are based on unrealistic assumptions, then we need to think seriously about what will happen within Iraq.

Yet, 3 years after the fact - in almost the same time we had smashed the Axis and sent Europe onto the path of rebuilding itself…

You mean December 1944?

Your leftwingnuttery has gone around the bend.

Read about WWII, Korea, even vietnam. Iraq a “major war zone”? What are you some kind of nut. We lost over 300,000 people in WWII (compared to the russians at something like 9 million!). On D-Day alone the US lost 2500 men…in ONE DAY.

Europe and japan tooks decades to rebuild, and for those of you keeping track, we STILL garrison troops there.

Stop with the constant cowardly mewling would you? It is tiresome, and on a day like today (remember, Memorial Day?) it is particularly vile to have to attempt to denigrate what our fighting men and women have worked so hard to achieve.