At least Bush is sticking to the June 30 date. If the U.S. is currently rethinking it's occupation plans, the turnover should provide some cover for any changes.

He's guilty of incitement to murder US troops. Pick him up, have a drumhead trial and hang him publicly.

"needless irritant"

You got that right OJ. Appears that Muslims the world over share that sentiment. Same was the case in Somalia, in Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, in Lebanon, in Madrid, in ah...Berlin,..New York.

Once we stop this irritation everything will be just peachy I'm sure.

Thought experiment:

South wins Gettysburg, marches on DC and it falls.

Turkey intervenes to free the North.

How long do American Christians tolerate their Muslim saviors?

"This is why we should have withdrawn by the end of last year. If the Shi'ites had already been granted self-determination there'd be little for Sadr to organize his factions around. Our presence is a needless irritant and an easy and legitimate rally cry."

Unbelievable commentary OJ. Kindly explain how leaving Iraq to the kind attentions of the Shi'ite clergy is any better than Saddam and his thugs. You don't really think that we invaded Iraq to make it safe for Islamists do you? Pull out? You don't get it. For all intents and purposes, we're never leaving.

NC3:

Wanna bet? Yes, the Shi'ites will do fine without us, the Kurds will be fine, the Sunni have to decide whether they get to stay in Iraq or not.

At this point, I have to agree with OJ. As far as I'm concerned the war was a failure when the claims of Al-Qaeda connections and WMD's turned out to be a pack of lies. OJ, being heart-broken over that mean old Saddam, and preferring instead the gentle ministrations of Sistani, al-Hakim and Sadr will still consider the war a success, no doubt.

However, despite the invasion being a class A snafu, once there I felt we should have made a good show. But that involved de-fanging the Shiite clerics. The U.S. has taken the exact opposite tact and cosseted them. Now they're biting the hand that fed them. As a result we'll eventually leave worse off than when we began security-wise.

So in other words the mission to Iraq was only to get rid of Saddam and the WMD threat? You really bought that? We're there to destroy the Islamic Confederacy not to save it. As I see it we either succeed in developing a hunger for democracy and moderate religion in the Middle East among these people or we will be forced to kill millions of them. The proliferation of atomic weapons can not be stopped and once the Islamic clergy has them they will use them.

Maybe I read you wrong and you meant move out of Iraq and move into Iran or maybe Saudi Arabia?

By the way, your analogy of a Turkish military presence in the US doesn't take into account the fact that they would not wait for a Christian uprising. There would be wholesale slaughter as a first not last resort provided they would enjoy the same overwhelming military superiority here at that time as we do there today.

Frankly this entire conversation is bewildering. You and your brother are two of the brightest intellectual stars on the net. Maybe you can expand on your ideas and provide an alternative to the plan I see talked about and developing. I'd love to bring the boys home. How do we do it and make sure the next 911 doesn't leave NYC radioactive?

NC3:

Worst case scenario for Shi'ite Iraq is that it goes through what Iran has, about a twenty-five year theocracy and then a hunger for Western-style democracy. That's a far faster evolution than any Western nations ever experienced.

Orrin,

You're counting your chickens before the eggs have hatched. Iran has yet to become a democracy. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. So far it hasn't. To paraphrase Michael Corlone, they've been dying of that heart attack for a few years now. Either way, we don't really know, and ceding Iraq to them (though tactically we may have no other choice) will be a strategic defeat. It may indeed prop them up and keep them in power longer than they would have had we stayed out of Iraq.

Derek:

So what? A couple years don't matter.

I don't know if we're only going to be worried about "just a couple of years," OJ. And neither do you, really. You're just guessing.

It might be ten or even twenty years, and who knows what can happen in that span of time? That's why the invasion was a mistake. Saddam posed no threat to us, but his potential replacements do.

Derek:

Saddam did pose a threat to us. Sooner or later--sooner, if the French had anything to say about it--the "containment" regime would have failed completely, and Saddaam would have been back in the nuke business. A few years after that, there's a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv . . . or London . . . or Baltimore.

Derek:

I agree Saddam was no threat to us, but he was bad for Iraq and that was bad for us. If it turns out Islam is iredeemable I have no problem with nuking the whole region and moving on. But I suspect they ultimately aren't much different than us.

I think OJ misses the larger picture here. A consolidated and enlarged Shiite empire in conflict with the Sunni countries around it would draw much of the world into economic collapse (oil shortages, among other things), but not before it also fianced and encouraged terror attacks throughout the West.

Withdrawing would be the most counterproductive act we could undertake.

rkb:

The Sunni and Shi'ites will go to war with each other but still have time and energy to fight us? Wow!

OJ

When shia Iran was at war with sunni (dominated)
Iraq, they had time on their hands to put out death warrants on Salman Rushdie, and sponsor terriost in Lebanon, who were probably responsible for the imprisonment private citizens, and also were connected to the blowing up of barracks of Marines.

WOW

h:

Which has what to do with the West?

The Marines were Americans, and there were Americans imprisoned for several years.

Remember Oliver North's brilliant manuever at reproachement with Iran in order to have Terry Anderson (?) and others released. I think North felt they were "redeemable".

My mistake I started to say Oliver North being reproached for dealing with terriosts.

They were in a Muslim nation.

So that is the state of affairs that you feel should prevail in the future. Americans go out of the "West" and therefore it's open season. Was not Salman Rushdie a British citizen (could just as easily been an American Citizen) and was he not endangered while living in Britain.

The point in this subset of the larger thread is your expressing incredulity at idea that the Shia could not fight against Sunni and scratch their *ss at the same time. They can and if we bug out of Iraq now they may do just that.

Rushdie asked for it. We should take blasphemny as seriously.

oj - Sadr is Iran's agent in Iraq. The Iranian government thinks this is their time to bring Bush down and Sadr is following orders.

The Iranian government is not going to be overthrown from within. It has too many terrorists to beat down the population. It needs a shove, before they have nuclear weapons.

Sadr's unpopular even among Shi'ites and Sistani can handle him if we remove the thorn in the Iraqi paw, which is us at this point.

Israel's not going to let Iran have nukes.

OJ, there's a saying you need to remember: "Hope is not a plan."

If anything, Bush's grand plan was to deliver a fatal death potion to the radical Islamists. Not to just smack them down for the nonce, but to put them on an inevitable death spiral. In order to do so, we have to take enough steps to make sure that we: 1) weaken them enough so that they can't recover, and 2) administer a massive dose of poison.

I have little doubt that we've been patiently waiting for the event. Could have happened anywhere, but it turns out that it happened in Falujah.

For the last 30 years, we've been leaving too soon. Time to stop doing that. Time to stay long enough to take care of the problem once and for all.

The Islamicists don't matter. Islam does. Reform the Islamic world so that its religion can coexist with liberal democracy and there''' be no Islamicists.

Reform won't happen unless the "virus" is just about dead. Time to kill Sadr and as many Fallujanatics as possible - then see what happens. Just like in Afghanistan - time to kill Heykmatyr and some other warlords. And if the mullahs in Tehran want to fight a proxy war, then start arming these rebels we keep hearing about.

Orrin has this fantasy that Shias, unlike all other Muslims, have abandoned the religion's project of destroying all infidels -- who include Orrin.

There aren't any good choices in dealing with this situation, but there are sure worse ones, and imagining that the same sentiments that motivate Muslims in Iran should be encouraged in Iraq is just crazy.

If they were truly democratic they'd want to be oppressed by their conquerors.

oj - Israel won't stop Iran from having nukes. They can't even stop the Palestinians from having Yasser Arafat.

Of course they could, they are just--mistakenly--more afraid of what comes after Arafat.