Where is Iraq Going?

[Xavier_Onassis]

Your solution seems rather impractical.

I think you left out the Truth and Reconciliation Councils.

I mean,. while you are at it...

[Michael Tee]

Could you picture Bush at a Truth and Reconciliation Council?  Maybe they could just skip the "Truth" part of it and focus on Reconciliation.  Does that mean hugs all round?  THAT he could probably manage.

[Plane]

Where Iraq is going has been the question of the hour since 2003 and not only remains so but for as far as the eye can now see. The answer is not so much elusive as it is unknowable with so many factors bearing on the problem in unforeseen ways, with so many intangibles combining with with entrenched, hostile interests and developing, explosive dynamics that the outcome, on either a short-term or a long-term basis, is a matter of sheer speculation and hope. If this portrait glowers with the reality of the situation, then should we persist in a die-hardd campaign of hope, or should we regroup and retrench (out-country) to fight smarter and wiser with the far horizon in our sights?

The future is not as availible for examination as the past is.

What mistakes in the past are stinging us now?

Reagan withdrew from Lebanon when we took casualtys , Bush and  Clinton seemed to continue this practice of ulling the burned hand from the fire.

Osama has not made his strategy secret, it is based on American unwilingness to take casualtys .

Was it a mistake to leave Mogadisu standing?

[gipper]

I don't subscribe to unvarying set of strategies and tactics, either on a temporally longitudinal basis or across theaters and discrete sets of problems. Further, your thinking, inflexible on its face, would necessarily occasion the same errors of the past, except in mirror image. And I don't have to tell you that not only was your selection of examples tendentiously incomplete but that it is belied by the prime example of them all, recently: the Cold War, the reason for our foray into Vietnam, came to a crashing conclusion in our favor (without a shot fired) some 15 years or so after our ignominious defeat in and withdrawal from Vietnam.

[Plane]

I don't subscribe to unvarying set of strategies and tactics, either on a temporally longitudinal basis or across theaters and discrete sets of problems. Further, your thinking, inflexible on its face, would necessarily occasion the same errors of the past, except in mirror image. And I don't have to tell you that not only was your selection of examples tendentiously incomplete but that it is belied by the prime example of them all, recently: the Cold War, the reason for our foray into Vietnam, came to a crashing conclusion in our favor (without a shot fired) some 15 years or so after our ignominious defeat in and withdrawal from Vietnam.

Almost immediately after our giveing up on VietNam we began to support the Mujudahadeen in Afganistan to cause the oviet Union to undergo the same mornfull cost.

Is there somethign equivelent that can be done to our present advesarys?