We can't guarantee a political endstate if we stay. We can't guarantee a political endstate if we leave. A political endstate is not a goal, it is a fantasy.

Win Congress = subpoena power.

So maybe in 2006, if we win back Congress, we send Bush pieces of paper for two years.

How do we prevent a full-blown depression, with all the horrific and nasty political, social, and economic consequences of such a state?

We can start by pulling out of Iraq and saving $5 billion per month. How does staying in Iraq indefinitely prevent an economic depression? How does withdrawal cause one? You are making absolutely no sense. Have you been smoking massive quantities of herb?

I am not accusing you of being Benjamin "big eyes" Netanyahu. I am merely saying that Americans are not aware what the costs of this war really are. If they were, they would not sign on to this. Bush has gotten a pass on national security because so far there were no attacks after 9-11. Or more appropriately, we never caught them before it was too late after 9-11 in the US.

Fact is, what is possible is a two-to three year committment for the Iraq war. What we can't pay for in light of rising debt is another Korea or Germany. Occupations end because you either leave willingly or get tossed the fuck out.

OK, the bad guys are bad guys.  How is us staying in Iraq not making more bad guys?  How is us staying in Iraq helping with Bin Laden?  We can't even catch one foreigner in Iraq, where we have 150K troops.  And we're supposed to get Bin Laden in Pakistan with even fewer troops in Afghanistan?

Iraq seems like a great big distraction to me.  Sounds like you're just trying to get to the plausible deniability point of being able to declare victory and bug out.  IMO, we're already past the point where anyone is going to believe that.

Why are we leaving behind a military base?  Just one?  I hear the number 14 bandied about.  Why should we leave an American footprint in Iraq?  Did I miss something about promising the Iraqis we were there to stay?

Just getting out is the worst option. Particularly if we don't kill Bin Laden. He says and has convinced his followers that the killing of American soldiers and not giving up can destroy a superpower because they outlasted the Russians in Afghanistan. We need more troops there for a short period of time, train Iraqis and take the help that is offered, use NATO to secure the borders while we do this so fewer things are being blown up.

Whoah there, big dog.  You're again conflating Iraq and Afghanistan.  Iraq still has nothing to do with the war on a tactic, except that it's providing a lovely little training ground as long as our soldiers are there.  If Bushco were serious about Bin Laden, we never would have gone to Iraq.

And pretty much every colonialist insurgency has outlasted the "superpower" that tried to maintain an occupation.  That's why it's such a damn stupid idea to invade and occupy a country an ocean and a culture away unless you're basically going to completely take it over and stay for decades.  Even then, you might eventually be thrown out.

(1) Why is NATO going to do anything in Iraq?  We've burned all of our bridges there.  That sounds like wishful thinking.

(2) What makes you think that a substantial amount of the blowing-up is from people coming across borders?  Even the military on the ground thinks that the vast majority of the insurgency is home-grown Iraqis.  Most of the suicide bombings and some of the kidnappings may not be, but thinking that closing the porous borders of a country the size of CA (even if you could do it) will stop the violence seems a little nonsensical to me.

Seriously, you don't sound like you've got much of a plan beyond "stay the course", which doesn't differentiate you from the Republicans on this issue.  You keep saying "there's a cost" but you really only focus on your perception of the reputational cost of pulling your fist out of the tar baby.  You haven't balanced that against any of the other costs, like the roughly $1 Billion / week that our children will be paying interest on, since we financed this war, or the dead Americans, or the dead Iraqis, or the continuing affront to Arab and Muslim pride from our presence on Arab lands.  

Remember, these are people who have already thrown out one colonial power, and who already believe that we're after their oil.  We've done nothing to discourage that.

You and Social Networker must be tokin' from the same bong. Those two sentences are complete nonsequiturs. There is absolutely no connection between withdrawing from Iraq and killing Bin Laden.

Stringing together random sentences does not a conclusion make.

NATO to secure the borders while we do this so fewer things are being blown up.

Where do you guys come up with the NATO bullshit? When did NATO make any promises to send troops to Iraq? Hey! I"ve got an idea. Let's have Martian troops guard the borders.

There is a cost to war. There is a heavy one to this war but we can't afford to just pull out.

Says who? Who says we can't afford to pull out and why? What are the unbearable costs of pulling out? The cost of staying is $5 billion per month and thousands of lives of American soldiers and tens of thousands of lives of innocent Iraqis.

I think foreign policy ought to be like contractual arrangements between individuals.  We have an interest in oil, sure.  But the middle east, as sellers, has as much of a need for us as buyers as we do in reverse.  OPEC provides them with greater unity, but oil buyers can bargain collectivelt for prices as well

As for humanitarian intervention, of course I think there are cases where individual and institutional involvement is needed.  But all too often, when states get involved, it turns into a game of self-interest realpolitik anyway.  Remember what happened in Somalia?  I have no doubt if we intervened in Darfur (given the large gas reserves there, and Chinese investment) it would quickly become another neo-imperialist venture.  

The root of the islamic movement comes from the failure of the first round of post-independence governments (propped up by the US) to provide anything to their people.  The first response was secular pan-arab nationalism with socialist tendencies, and that was also crushed as a political option by the U.S.  Islamic radicalism is the only place dissidents have left to go in the muslim world, sadly.  

And yes, I do think it will all go away.  The Algerians stopped bombing France as soon as they pulled out of Algeria.  No one screws with small, unassuming nations like Switzerland, Sweden, Costa Rica, or New Zealand.  It could be argued that the existence of the U.S lets these countries not be targets for foreign aggression, but I think that the U.N. and the post WW2 international framework has played a far larger role in the general peacableness of the world internationally (there are still a ton of domestic conflicts, but a nazi-germany like annexion spree seems impossible for at least a generation, probably longer).  

The only big danger I see is that those people who have risen to the top in the terrorist circles are cynics I believe who use the terrorist networks for power.  If the U.S. was no longer a threat, they would need to find something new to justify holding their organizations, and their political power, together.  But I think it would severely restrict their ability to get sympathy from the general muslim populace, and finding willing suicide bombers would become increasingly difficult.  

Ma'am.

Chris