[mog]

Originally Posted by scandium

What you just don't get is that Iraq has already been turned into precisely just that; pre-invasion it was a weak, contained, sovereign and secular dictatorship. Saddam Hussein, whatever his other failings, had no love for religious extremism within his borders and took pains to ruthlessly crush and supress any kind of extremism in Iraq, religious based or otherwise since it posed a threat to his power. Now that he's been removed, and the Iraqi civil service and military disbanded, a power vacuum was instantly created with the U.S. military presence serving as a powerful rallying point for the Imans and Jihads to rally the ordinary Iraqis (and former, now unemployed soldiers) against and it also served as an ideal battlefield for foreign Jihadists to easily cross its porous borders and take the fight to the U.S.

Bad trade off for the Iraqis, who are dying in far greater numbers than under Hussein even when he was at his most brutal (while the rest are simply worse off in every way and ideal prey for Jihadi rhetoric), bad trade off for the U.S. which has invested 2600+ now dead true patriots and over a trillion dollars for nothing more than billions in no-bid contracts for Halliburton and Co., and bad trade for the region which has become further destabilized with new generations ready to be indoctrinated into Jihad and get live fire training to practice and perfect their tactics... and bad trade for all of us because they will export their new experience and methods and recruits to our soil soon enough.

Remove the U.S. military and if nothing else you remove the rallying cause, because keeping them there is already pointless. That war is already lost and was lost years ago.

Better that the terrorists are attacking well armed and trained US soldiers than unarmed and defenceless US civilians. Remove the target in Iraq, and the Jihadists will simply move on to kill Americans somewhere else. Withdrawing won't solve anything.