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I ain't hitting the abuse button.

There's a good chance we won't occupy Iraq, the resistance movement in Iraq is pretty strong, just not strong enough to topple Saddam. During Desert Storm they managed to take control of 90% of the nation. It's not like Afghanistan which is a major trainwreck and will have to be guided very carefully to some form of sane government. There aren't the dozens of warring factions in Iraq, there's an actual infrastructure in place. We'll probably still want to occupy it for a while, long enough to get things settled, but it's probably not going to be the painful nation building process of Afghanistan.

There aren't the dozens of warring factions in Iraq

I concur with nearly all of your other comments in this thread, but I'm not as sanquine as you are on this score. There is a good chance that Kurds and Shiites, for instance, will be at each other's throats. There is an even better chance that Kurds (maybe even in some combination with Shiites and even Sunnis) will try to screw over the Turkmen. If this happens Turkey, I think, will not stand by this time (even though they have in the past when ethnic turks were being slaughtered). They might well intervene unilaterally in ways that could weaken our coalition. Then we have to be careful that the Turks, and even more so Iraqi Muslims, are giving the Armenian Christians a fair shake. Etc, etc, etc...

In sum I fear we will have to nanny it up in Iraq for some significant period of time. It will be worth it though, and in our interest. Not just for the sake of Iraq, but for catalyzing favorable change elsewhere in the region.

Afghanistan isn't a nation. We can't make one of it without someone applying a great deal of direct force. We can't and shouldn't do that. Hopefully a powerful government can emerge that will get the support of most of the warlords and hopefully undermine them in the long run. It's going to be a very long and bloody road like it has always been there.

Our job is to make sure that no section in Afghanistan support ALQ and give them a safe haven. We are still a long way from doing that. At least they don't have as much of a safe haven as they did before.

I'm disappointed that we missed our best opportunity to kill the enemy but we have accomplished a lot in Afghanistan so far but without killing the enemy those gains are more likely to be only temporary.

Policians look about as far as the next election.