[Mazer]

Originally Posted by Repo

Keeping American troops in Iraq is sentencing them to death. Iraq is in a civil war and the sooner the American forces leave the better it is for the soldiers and America. It is better to cut and run than stay and die...

The statistics disagree with you here. Soldiers in Iraq, who are trained to respond to danger, die at a lesser rate than American civilians who drive themselves to work every day. While keeping troops in Iraq may not exactly be a reprieve, their training and tactics make them far safer abroad than at home. I think it's not the fact that some soldiers die that bothers you, just the idea that they might be dying for nothing. Of course, they're the ones who signed up for service, and by now they knew the dangers ahead of time, so it's rather selfish of us to question the risk they're taking while we're at home and they're not.

Now many of the Bush Administration are under the false impression that leaving Iraq now would put the whole region in chaos, especially leaving Israel vulnerable. That is completely wrong. Pulling American troops out of Iraq entirely would actually stabilize the region and be in in Israel's best interest. The Middle East is mostly made up of Muslim countries but those countries are split between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims, not unlike Iraq itself.

The region may stablize itself in our absence, but we'd never be able to tell the difference. What goes on in the middle east can never simply be ignored and we can't just pretend that we didn't have anything to do with the downfall of the previous Iraqi government.

If our strategies don't work that simply means our strategies should change. Stay the course, contrary to the way the term is used, was never an actual strategy. And cut & run bears little resemblance to the kind of tactical retreat RDixion seems to be refering to. We shouldn't be talking like those are our only two options; neither option is actually on the table at this point.

Right now the United States is stuck in an Iraqi quagmire.

This has been repeated over and over for years now. Iraq is not a bog, it's a desert. Our soldiers do good work over there, and their only real obstacle is American political bullshit.

The American military is the best fighting machine in the world but no military can win when they are in the middle of another country's civil war.

And you know this how? The Republican Guard seemed to do a pretty good job of keeping the Shi'ites from warring with the Sunnis, and they managed to wage a full blown war with Iran at the same time with only a few Russian tanks and missiles at their disposal. The question isn't wether the people of Iraq can be stopped from fighting against each other (they can), the question is whether they will decide to make peace now that they've finally been given a choice.