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Honestly, I do not think this is so much a cult of death as the result of several hundred years of lack of foreign policy resolve when the West dealt with Arab countries. They are convinced they can drive us out if they kill enough of us, as they did with the Crusaders, the European Colonialists, the United Nations, and even The United States in previous campaigns (e.g. Lebanon, Somalia). Having succeeded in driving out Spain and the Philippines already only further encourages this belief.

The sad part is they are absolutely right. Fixing the Middle East has never been important enough to the West to invest the amount of lives and treasure it would take to do the job right. If we try to run Iraq much longer, the political will in this nation to continue supporting the policy will collapse. I was a hawk when Bush took us in, and will not hypocritically turn on the policy now: Bush did what I wanted him to do and I appreciate that. However, I am beginning to wonder if democracy in Iraq is worth the price in American lives. Getting rid of Saddam was worth it up to this point, but is it worth the further sacrifice to play wet nurse to a democracy that will be dominated by the Shiites no matter what we do?

Maybe we need to pull a Diem on Saddam and some of his top henchmen (the whacking part, I mean, as we have already overthrown them) and get the hell out of Dodge. Let the Shiites win the election, make sure they dominate the new Army, and let nature take its course. I am sure if we were not there to stop guys like Al Sadr from going after the Baathists, the outcome for the Sunnis will be much more like Custer's outcome at Little Big Horn than Sitting Bull's. That may be as stable as Iraq can be without investing hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars and tens of thousands of U.S. lives.

After all, we killed millions of Vietnamese and lost 55,000 American lives 30 to 40 years ago. The net result is we now have in Vietnam exactly what we would have had if we had not taken the war over from the French. The very ironic part is that today's Vietnam is much more like South Vietnam in 1964 than North Vietnam in 1964. We could have won that one by staying home. As with the invasion of Iraq, though, at the time and knowing what we knew then, I would have supported the Vietnam policy and would further have supported going into North Vietnam to do the job right. No one in 1964 could have forseen the ironic outcome I mentioned above, so I do not wish to diminish the value of the sacrifice of the brave Americans who fought in Vietnam - not even John Kerry. I do, however, want to learn the lessons of history.

If we leave Iraq in a hurry, say toward the end of next year after the legislative elections have been held, we will leave a nascent democracy dominated by Shiites. The Shiites and Kurds both have it out for the Sunnis and they can be much more effective in "repressing the insurgents" (translation: killing off all the Saddamites who do not want to play ball) than we could be with the world press and the U.N. and Amnesty International, etc. looking over our shoulders. If we stay for ten years and watch tens of thousands of Americans die and spend huge amounts of money we should be spending on preparing for the coming confrontation with China, the net result will be we will leave a nascent democracy dominated by Shiites.

My conclusion, if you have not been able to divine it from my turgid prose, is we should not cut and run today, but a year from now we may have reached the point of diminishing returns. It may be time to create a plan that will put an "Amen" to American involvement in Iraq before January 2006.