You could be right about this, Fantasma. A rapid USA pullout back to Kuwait would result in some very nasty internal violence in Iraq as the Shiite majority slammed down on the Sunnis and the Kurds...but Iraq is riddled with very nasty internal violence anyway already. It's like hell on earth in Iraq, and the different communities have been divided utterly against each other. In Baghdad the city has been more or less ethnically cleansed into sealed neighborhoods of one group or the other. The harm that has been done to that society by the American invasion has been simply catastrophic, and the fallout from it is going to last a long time. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy which will explode like the Geni from the lamp as soon as the lid of foreign occupation is taken off the pot.

None of this has much of anything to do with Al-Queda (which is a largely fictional entity, specially in Iraq). It has to do with the aspirations of 3 separate ethnic/cultural communities IN Iraq...the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds, and they will fight it out as soon as restraints to their doing so are removed.

Someone will win that fight and take over in Baghdad, and a new "strong man" will emerge, possibly worse than Saddam, but life will gradually get back to normal, if you could call it "normal".

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Bobert, I like Obama's proposal okay, as it stands...but I don't trust it to stand once he's in office and he has to start dealing with the great corporate powers that be which stand all around and behind the presidency. I don't trust him to hold to that promise, even if he now is being genuinely honest in making it.

I would vote for him, yes, on the basis of what he says now...but I highly doubt that it will play out that way afterward.


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Keep this in mind, folks. The Germans did not know how to withdraw from France either. It was a real conundrum. Even when defeat was inevitable, they could not figure out how to withdraw.

Withdrawing from Russia was even more problematical, not to mention withdrawing from Greece or Yugoslavia. No withdrawal plan could be found which was...well...comfortable to contemplate.

Criminal aggressors, you see, have a real problem on their hands when they are occupying a foreign land, but it just doesn't work out according to their original plan.