What If We Would Seriously Ponder the Unthinkable?

It is not a strategy at all. It is just an exit. He proposes to regard them as ungrateful and leave them to their murderers and tyrants.

He overlooks the fact that those murderers and tyrants - who will take power by force instantly, and slaughter up to a million people for having worked with us, and who will crow about it to the rooftops, will then turn the entire country into a base for AQ operations.

We will then have the option of returning and doing it all over again, which no one will believe we will actually do - least of all facing an election in which one candidate will certainly oppose the idea - or letting them have the place, and letting them use it as their new Afghanistan.

"But surely the rest of the Iraqis will finally see what it what and stop them." No. The rest of the Iraqis do not have the courage, the training, the equipment or the ability to take on their home grown thugs. Who will be backed by Iran and Syria, supported by thousands of outside soldiers and tens of millions of dollars, etc. All of them scrambling for a $10 billion a year oil revenue stream, which they will use to finance additional operations against us.

It is just a fantasy, the same old one that if we leave them alone they will leave us alone. Wrap your mind around it once and for all. They will not leave us alone, no matter what we do or where our troops are. Wherever we are on earth, they will look for us and kill us - unless we disarm or kill them, first.

Wars are not optional things vetoed and called off by either party. You can't unilaterally end a war, except by winning it or wiping the other side out. They aren't going to make peace because we leave. They were at war with us before we went and they will be at war with us after. The war is not optional. They started it. Either we finish it, there, or they will. Here.

June 30 is a transfer of some political functions to temporary Iraqi authorities. Nobody is going anywhere.

Iraqi elections for a constitution writing body are scheduled for next January - after our own, so they can know what our policy is going to be before they vote.

Then they will set up some system, and will have to hold elections under that system. That is scheduled for December of next year, a year after our own elections.

Only after those so elected take office - at the begining of 2006 - will Iraq have its own fully functioning, democratically elected, constitutionally legal new government. Then we can talk about leaving, or retaining only a few bases if they want us to, while they basically take responsibility for their own affairs.

That is the timeline. All the cut and run people are suggesting we trash it, write off a democratic Iraqi government as beyond our capabilities, and run away before that has all happened.

Which is a recipe for a civil war, a failed state, and Afghanistan II as a base for AQ terrorists, this time with about a hundred times the financing. It is a recipe for defeat in other words.

Meanwhile, there isn't a single thing the terrorists can actually do to kick us out before the entire timeline plays out. Only we can do that. They are just saying "boo" and creating openings for our defeatists to shout that the sky is falling. The sky isn't falling. Defeatists just want to ride the cry that it is, into the White House.

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