The question

Soapbox time on the war conundrum.

In my mind, the question is not about whether our actions to remove Saddam made us safer--we can argue the point ad infinitum. No, the question is whether leaving Iraq immediately will make us safer.

There's a lot of liar, liar these days. But I think both sides would agree the last thing anyone wants is more casualties. We are a compassionate nation, focused more on the individual than any other nation on earth. The concept of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness still lives (even if we're no longer allowed to talk about that pesky "creator" anymore). Nobody wants our troops to die for a worthless cause, even if they signed up voluntarily.

My question requires a risk/reward process. Specifically--will the reward of pulling our troops before Iraq is stabilized outweigh the risk that such a move will lead to the erosion of security in the entire region, along with a massive moral victory for both tinhorn regimes and Jihadists the world over?

Quote history of conquest if you must, but I contend this war is different than any before it in one aspect-- WMD. Never before have guerrilla forces had the ability to inflict mass casualties without large armies. No, we didn't find WMDs in Iraq, but leaving it open for terrorist business hardly seems a good idea. And we can't forget the oil. Any regime we leave behind will be flushed in petroleum cash. That's a tad different than North Korea, who possesses no such strategic resources to enact worldwide blackmail.

When we left Vietnam there was little chance the Vietnamese would send terror squads to lower 48 to blow up national landmarks. Our departure left us with a medium-long term loss in that we failed to stop the domino from falling, but the fall did not threaten us directly. Leaving Iraq offers no such guarantees--it's not the same domino. That's the main reason my vote goes to staying the course-- at least long enough to give their government a chance.

Keep in mind if we choose to leave Iraq, it will not stop there. The forces of terrorism will employ the same strategy in every location until we're completely out. The domino effect in reverse, if you will.

MORE 11/21

Apparently this lady agrees with me (or vice versa, depending on perspective). Somehow it just doesn't give me a warm fuzzy.

Alpha Charlie

11/22

Cheney weighed in last night. Despite CNN trying to "X him out", he agrees with the above opinions. That's hardly surprising. I find it interesting that Hillary is in agreement with him.

Cheney discussed the WMD question and said something he'll get thrashed for:

shrugged off the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. "We never had the burden of proof," he said, adding that it had been up to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to prove to the world that he didn't have such weapons.

The left will say that Bush/Cheney "didn't let the inspectors finish their work", ie Hans Blix. They have a point, although the success of international inspection teams working in totalitarian regimes is ripe for debate. We saw evidence of that when Libya admitted a nuke program despite years of IAEA inspections. In Iraq's case, their yellowcake at al-Tuwaitha was tagged and sealed by IAEA. Had Saddam been trying to build a bomb he'd need that pile of YC intact to act as a decoy to the inspectors, allowing him to slide the real stuff in under the table. These guys are gangsters, remember.

Former UNSCOM weapons inspector Bill Tierney, a controversial figure similar to Scott Ritter but on the opposite side, certainly thought Saddam had a weapons program. He was quite pessimistic that international bodies alone could disarm thugocracies. Butler, Kaye and Duelfer, much less incendiary in their public political views, all thought Saddam would eventually restart his WMD programs, and all agreed that he needed to go.