Yeah, we'll be in Iraq at least a decade. It'll take a disaster (or a Democrat) to get us out early, and a bigger disaster will follow if we leave early. A point about the Marshall Plan: I think the model is overused. One of the keys to its success is that Europe was trashed. WWII was dirty, long, and bloody enough to kill enough of the bad guys and bludgeon the spirit of war from the survivors. Those circumstances made it a lot easier to plant the seeds for our way of doing things.
I'm interested in seeing whether a three week war with a more foreign culture tills the ground in quite the same way.
