Had no one checked the stats on this one? Had they voted to go to war and ultimately take over a county they knew nothing about?

Democracy.... Did they think it was going to be easy to install in Iraq?

I hate to say it but I agree with the Republicans on this one. It sickens me to see the same Democrats who voted for this war call for a withdrawl. They are obviously doing this because that is as close as any of them-almost all of whom voted for this war-can get to cashing in the Anti War sentiment. But this political move would have as many consequences as the one that got us into this mess to begin with! This is not like Vietnam where you are leaving a war you were losing. With Iraq we have at this point charged ourselves with a huge responsibility. The moral difference is the equivalent of no longer sending money to support a friend's child compared to abandoning your own. This is a country we have occupied whose government we have knocked out and replaced with a much less effective one. Is it not our duty now to make sure that this new government is more effective than the old one we felt obliged to replace, at least in terms of the danger level?

The bottom line is a lot of troops and citizens are dying every day in a country the size of a state under our new government. We cannot leave this country in a state of instability we helped create! When Iraq goes to full scale civil war the US will be even more blighted on the world stage than we are for going in the first place. Going was bad enough. Going, failing, and returning with the country in worse shape than before we came would be infinitly worse.

We all know this move was a mistake. The signs were there when it started but everyone ignored it. Almost everyone. The voices of protest were drowned out. But people are not only in certain instances slow to react, they can be fickle as well. So now that the war is going how many predicted it would all along, some people want to cut their losses and leave.

What was the rhetoric for going? WMDs... the expiration date on that lie came to pass a long time ago. So what is left? Liberation. Ah, yes. Why liberate them? Because we cared so much about them as to risk our own troops on the cause, right? Well if we care about them how can we leave them on the brink of civil war?

Everyone knows now that less lives would have been lost had we never gone. That is sadly obvious. Should have been obvious before the fact, but I'll give my fellow citicizens a pass on this one-due to 9/11 no one was thinking clearly. Even those whose job is to be objective in the face of such circumstances. They failed us, we believed them, and thus Iraq. The disparity between how many lives were lost because of our choice as opposed to the rate they were dying under Saddam's watch is the most shocking facet of our failure.

And the difference in American lives lost is absolute. Who was Saddam going to hunt down and kill with his invisible WMDs? He was embroilled in his own conflicts a half a world away.

The whole point of many of us prior to the war is that this would be too much fo a burden for our country. Going beyond the immorality of the invasion itself, I do not think anyone thought the real problem would be with the takeover but rather the new government we planned to install in a region that had no interest in democracy. The moment we knocked Saddam out of power we took over this country as our own, and now we cannot let it go until we have set up some workable system that can keep its people at least as safe as under Saddam's watch. And in fact if it is not substantially safer than Saddam's regime then this is a scarring insult not to democracy itself but to the means with which we implimented it here.

Hussein may have been a madman but he was far more pragmatic than the nutcases who thought us taking on his duties would be in our best interest. He at least knew not to overextend himself. But now we are there, lives have been lost in the cause, and to pull back at this point would do a disservice to the very people we went in to liberate. We owe it to them to find a way to make their new government gain control. I think it is absurd that those who voted for this war now lead the charge to exit it prematurely, as if this will catch them favor with the Anti War crowd. Leaving early only compounds the problem. Leave early and everytime we read about Iraq and how things are sliding into a downward spiral, we can think first of how we threw them into it and left to watch the show from oevrseas. A real classic piece of American history. Look over the scope of our history and you will see two great moments, the Revolution and WW2, and a whole bunch of errors. I do not think two great moments of bravery will be enough to sustain the history of this nation should we continue to make ill thought out mistakes like this. This country deserves more than to be remembered with the same collective sigh history will recollect the Bush Administration with....

I may not have cared about the fate of Iraq ten years ago but I sure as hell care about it now. I care about it now because their history is intertwined with our own from here on out. If they fail, so did we, and in no small way. That we could go on with our lives as they kill each other and blissfully think along the lines of, "Well they would have ended up in civil war anyway" would show how unworthy of the task we were in the first place.

Some liberators. We liberated them from anything resembling order and left the moment things got complicated.We wanted to play this game on easy mode and now that the difficulty has ratcheted up a few notches we are willing to quit halfway through? Apparently this cause was only a worthwhile one to them if it was easily accomplished. Some blame the handling of the war but I say it would have been this difficult no matter how it was executed simply because you are trying to instill democracy in a foreign culture hostile to US values.

The Democrats try to act as if this war could have been won easily while offering no tangible alternatives except to leave. Ah, if only they had the foresight to initiate this attitude before they voted to authorize war in the first place! But they did and now they are at the infamous "point of no return." To leave now would only compound the problems of our going in the first place and greatly deepen this black mark on our country's history.

Our charge now is to carry out the dreams of a madman. God help us all.