[dervish]

"This is the same foreign policy of Senator Kerry when he ran for president in 2004. He promised in effect to replace American soldiers with those of Iraq's Arab neighbors in order extricate our country from the grand project it started in 2003."

Backdoor to withdrawal. Backstabbing State Department.

[SE Mom]

I hope those who keep saying "Condi in 08" will read this carefully.

I swear- the State Dept has something in the water that turns otherwise rational people into liberal dolts.

[an italian]

talking of "resistance" in iraq now is an insult for people like my grand parents who risked their lives trying to fight fascism during the WWII... that's all.

[tet68]

a former aide to President Clinton's U.N ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, Suzanne Nossel,

Yes, Susan, lets turn the hen house over to the Fox.

[satchmodog9]

Resistance is futile.

[marron]

Any premature withdrawal will doom the war in Iraq.

An Arab-League-run occupation will not lead to any outcome we will consider a success. It will only guarantee that the arab status-quo continues to be status quo. The arab status quo is precisely what we went in to overturn.

Syria is arab status quo. Saudi Arabia is arab status quo. Iran is, not arab, but middle eastern status quo. This is the natural culture that will resume its course the moment we pull out, if we pull out before new institutions have been put in place. This thing has to be done right, or it would be better never to have done anything at all.

A premature pull-out in Southeast Asia brought us genocide and thirty years of totalitarian rule. And millions of refugees. Premature withdrawal from Iraq will bring disaster.

I realize that Bush is up against it politically, elections are a year away, and he needs to be able to declare victory in time for the midterms. Thats fine. But electioneering is one thing, reality is another. While building a virtual victory for electoral purposes, we must not lose sight of "real" reality. Real reality is not as malleable as its virtual PR-shaped cousin, and it is real reality that will haunt us if we fail to respect it.

[SaxxonWoods]

1. Completing the split of Zarqawi from the local insurgents is the key to victory at this point, and the only way to avoid or contain a civil war. It's OK to negotiate with Iraqis, not with Terrorists, and Rice is marking the difference here. The Iraqis are doing the same. The only other solution is the wholesale slaughter and/or oppression of 20% of Iraq's population.

2. Heavy-handed US rejection of statements by the fledgling Iraqi government will not assure said government and Arabs in general that we see Iraq as sovereign, and not a protectorate of the US.

3. All wars end with reconciliation. Germany and Japan are allies today, go back and read how they were vilified in 1944-50. We lost several thousand troops to the German insurgency in the late 1940s.

I respectfully disagree with the knee-jerk reactions I read above. But I am a total hawk on winning this peace. I say peace because the war is over, it was won long ago. We keep letting the antis frame the argument. The war is over, we toppled Saddam, and made sure Iraq will not be a Terrorist haven, and a State sponsor of Al-Qaeda. Instead it is and will be a Terrorist kill zone, until Al-Qaeda retreats to its' next protector. What we are engaged in now is a temporary security operation.

[indcons]

Condi Rice has become of the the sheeple at the State Department. Her support of the Palestinians is TROUBLING and is proof that people at the State Dept. live in a parallel universe filled with liberal rats.