Please stop comparing Iraq to Vietnam, there's no way 58,000 American soldiers are going to die there. There's no draft. There's no Ho Chi Minh trail. The comparison is not only futile, it's tiresome.
Shiites and Sunnis aren't as despairate to kill each other as you think. A civil war might be inevitable if we left them alone now, but the longer we engage them politically the more they learn and more preventable civil war becomes. Besides, if the Shiites decide to slaughter Sunnis then Saudi Arabia will close its borders to all Shiites, not just Iraqis. Without access to Mecca an international war might begin, and nobody in the middle east wants that to happen. So if a couple thousand soldiers dying will save the lives of millions of Muslims then it's something we must do.
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