The difference is like Viet Nam, we will have an ongoing one man against us war for the foreseeable future.
In addition, Nixon was elected in part due to his promise to get us out of Viet Nam. Nixon was hardly a liberal or democrat.
I fail to see how I help. But in reality, we are between a rock and a hard place. I guess since you are such a dedicated partiot you should have a guess as to troop levels in 2 years, 5 years and 10 year. For that matter, why not forecast 20. For now, we are in the 160,000 range. Do you believe we will be at 50 or 25% of that level in two years or even 5?
joesbucks,
You wrote: "...we will have an ongoing one man against us war for the foreseeable future..."
Therein lies the critical difference. We did not have Vietnamese flying planes into our skyscrapers, or killing our citizens throughout the world. We do have people from the Middle East doing that now.
We are at war, even if Rolling Stone and many American citizens or politicians don't understand. If we remove the troops over there, we will be fighting the war over here.
We will be attacked again, no doubt. I want our country to make it as difficult as possible for them to attack us at home, even if that means chasing them on their home turf, day after day, from house to house even if just to keep them from hooking up their laptop long enough to download instructions to their terrorist buddies.
Asking scory, yourself or me to make some kind of prediction about troop levels doesn't really address any kind of facet of the issue, in my opinion. None of us know what the right level should be since none of us have a crystal ball. Personally, I think we will be in Iraq for the next 3 years at large troop levels, and will draw that level down to several hundred or thousand over the next seven after that. But what the heck does that mean? I have never set foot in Iraq, have never led troops, never fired a gun or set up a roadblock. And even the guys over there who HAVE done those things don't know. In war, as in life, everyone is going to perceive it differently. The guy who drives a road near Mosul where dozens of vehicles have been hit by IED's is definitely going to perceive Iraq differently from a guy stationed up north in the Kurdish areas.
Bottom line: we are in this for the forseeable future whether we are in Iraq or not. I think our best bet is to be there to fight the terrorists on their soil. If we can free a bunch of Iraqis and introduce them to Democratic rule, that is a great and worthy byproduct.