[Steven Pro]

I keep hearing about how we don't have a good exit strategy for Iraq. I would like someone to tell we what our exit strategy is for South Korea? We have been there for decades. How about Japan and Germany? We still have troops stationed there since WWII. It would seem the only exit strategy I can recall was Vietnam, admit defeat and run away, which is what I am convinced some people want for political reasons.

[Poseidon]

How about a full scale withdrawl from all the places you mentioned? It seems to me all those troops could be used in the South-East right about now.

[Steven Pro]

I would not necessarily be opposed to a more isolationist policy. It is the hypocracy which bothers me.

[schrocat]

For there to be hypocrisy, there must be similarity.
There isn't any, well...except this glaringly obvious one...

Vietnam was started under false pretenses and even had its own "aluminum tube\WMD" moment with the "incident" in the Gulf of Tonkin.

We are 0-2 with wars started under false pretenses...(according to your observation on Vietnam and W.F. Buckley Jr. regarding Iraq)

I just hope we never go for 0-3.

[Ninong]

I wonder if we ever had an "exit strategy" for Iraq? What if Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz planned to establish permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq all along?

Obviously things haven't gone as they expected. They expected to begin sending the troops home within 90 days after the fall of Baghdad. In fact, Gen. Tommy Franks even instructed his subordinates to begin planning for a drawdown to 30,000 troops within six months after the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2003.

Cheney and Rumsfeld expected to defeat the Iraqi army within three months and they accomplished that ahead of schedule. There was never any doubt that the U.S. could defeat the Iraqi military. The only question was how long it would take and how many casualties we would suffer. The expectation that we would not encounter significant resistance after the defeat of the Iraqi army was unrealistic. Allowing the ammo depots to fall into the hands of what would become the insurgents was a serious blunder. Allowing Iraqis to loot and plunder at will with no attempt to stop them following the fall of Baghdad was a VERY significant mistake.

Gen. Shinseki was right when he said that it would take several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq. Later, in closed session, he put the exact minimum number of troops at 400,000. Shortly thereafter, Secretary Rumsfeld announced Shinseki's replacement a full year before his retirement date. That had never been done before and was a deliberate attempt by Rumsfeld to intimidate any other generals who might be thinking of questioning his military expertise. Wolfowitz famously testified that estimates that the war might cost $50-$100 billion were wildly off the mark on the high side. He guaranteed Congress that oil revenues from the Iraqi oil fields would cover the expense of rebuilding Iraq.

We now know that Gen. Shinseki wasn't the only high-ranking general who warned the administration that their plans were unrealistic. All of those warnings were dismissed. In fact, Wolfowitz even went so far as to say that Iraq did NOT have a history of sectarian strife or tribal differences like Afghanistan. How could he have been so out of touch with history?

Colin Powell gave them the best advice. He said that the Pottery Barn rule would apply to Iraq: "You break it, you own it." He also advised them to go in with overwhelming force and with a plan to defeat the Iraqi army, to establish a new democratic government and, most importantly, a plan to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. We now know that we had a plan to defeat the Iraqi army but no real plans for anything after that.

Yes, we have removed Saddam Hussein from power, but what else have we done? We have brought hundreds, if not thousands, of Al-Qaida fighters to Iraq where they didn't dare set foot before. We have brought anarchy and chaos to Iraq. We have unleashed ancient hatreds that are now making it virtually impossible for them to establish a coalition government.

Should we begin to pull out immediately? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Our presence seems to be making matters worse rather than better. Iraq is NOT in better shape today than it was a year ago in spite of what Bush tells us over and over. And Iraq, even if we're lucky, will not have the kind of democratic government that we were promised three years ago. The odds in favor of a government of national unity aren't all that attractive right now. We may have to settle for three autonomous regions that coexist without too much violence between each other. Separating Kurdistan from the rest of the country should be relatively easy. Splitting the southern Shiite dominated areas from the middle of the country where the Sunnis are in the majority won't be nearly as easy. The risk is that Iran will support the Shiites in their efforts to deprive the Sunnis of any fair share of the country's wealth and that the Sunni Arab countries (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Jordan) will step in on the side of the Sunnis. This scenario assumes that we have already left the country.

I don't know what's going to happen in Iraq. I don't like the situation we find ourselves in and I don't see much hope for a real coalition government taking control of it's own security anytime soon. I was surprised to see Bush yesterday declare that the problem is no longer his, he's leaving it to the next President to decide when to pull our troops out of Iraq. This was his little adventure, you would think that he would have a plan of his own to offer. His only plan at the moment is to continue making speeches telling us about the wonderful progress we're making in Iraq.

Colin Powell was right. The Pottery Barn rule has come back to bite us in the rear end and all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put Iraq back together again.