Only if it somehow turns sweet. Right now it tastes like vinegar. Prolonged guerrilaa war in Iraq ties our military down and other countries will exploit that. Iran already is. They know that America will not support another invasion/occupation of this type anytime soon.

After the wildly succcessful Gulf War in 1991, we were feared by everybody in the Middle East. We quickly came around the world, smashed a large third-world army, and re-established a friendly dictatorship in Kuwait. Then we left Iraq to pick up the pieces of its own folly. Then we made Serbia surrender after a punishing airpower campaign that did not cost us a single casualty. Then we took down Afghanistan quickly and put a friendly local into power. Hostile countries worried that they could be taken down by the Americans with little cost or casualties. Therefore they knew we were not only capable but would be willing to do it again.

In none of these cases did we try to occupy the country, get bogged down in a Viet-Nam like guerilla war, lose domestic and international support, and end up in a declining security quagmire with no exit strategy. Dubya's War has revealed all of a superpower's weaknesses. This disasterous move has emboldened old enemies like Iran and North Korea who feared to make open nuclear advancement until after Iraq. They know that we are militarily, economically, and politically unable to to invade them now. We are being exploited by real enemies by remaining a prisoner to the fiasco in Iraq.

And Osama still runs free.

There is no "sweet freedom" in Iraq, martin my lad. Anybody can see it. We all agree that democracy would be great in the Middle East, but this Iraq path ain't getting us there and it is hurting us far, far more than it is helping us.

Worldwide utopia, elysian fields, and free lunch would be great. Everybody agrees. But democracy has to come from the people there. We can't make them democratic if they are unwilling to embrace for it themselves. If they were as willing to fight for democracy as much as they are willing to fight us, they would be democratic already. How could 150,000 Bathists dominate a country of 26 million? Because the people aren't worthy of democracy yet.

Any other country in the world whose leader had cost them 8 years of casualties versus Iran and then got them humiliated in Kuwait would have overthrown Saddam. It takes a special kind of incompetence, when one is a leader of a medium-sized third world country, to maneuver himself into a shooting war with The United States of America. But the Iraqis did not rise against Saddam like they have risen against us.

Democracy in the Middle East would be ideal, but the notion that we can go there and force them into it by endlessly patrolling Iraq is just not realistic or viable. It's the impossible dream. We need to refocus on killing Osama and his boys and keeping the nuclear lids on Korea, Iran, and Pakistan.

And the candidate that runs on that platform will win the 2008 election.

Who are you talking to? I didn't mention "Peace" anywhere in my post. I'm advocating redirecting the military focus back to more serious threats.

They are emboldend by the fact that we are tied down in Iraq. They know we can stomach a fight. We take down countries whenever and wherever we want to. We win every battle. Even in Iraq. We have retaken some Iraqi cities from the terrorists as many as five times. And that is the problem. There aren't enough troops to retain territory in a country this size. We leave and they come back.

We are fighting the enemy's kind of war instead of our kind of war. The Vietnam mistake. The American way of war is to overwhelm an enemy with airpower and a blitzkreig ground war if necessary. No one can match us or withstand us in such a war. But in Iraq we have allowed ourselves to be engaged in a guerilla insurgency where the enemy can contest us easily with small arms and explosives. We are not even using the overwheming force that was so effective in Panama, Grenada, and Kuwait.

The impressive 21-day ground campaign to defeat Saddams military was easily accomplished by an 120,000-man force that is clearly too small to win an insurgency this big over such a physical area and the brass had warned us that it was. The situation has not improved one bit in three years and shows no signs of improving.

We already won the war and sacked the country. Saddam and the WMD's are gone. The way to win this insurgency is to let the crazy ragheads fight each other instead of uniting against us. All we have to do is leave.

I have posted at length on these subjects before. If you do an advanced search for Red55 and the words Korea, Pakistan. Iran, and China you will see some of what I think about who I think our next enemies will be. If you can't find them, I will rehash. But it's Bama week, martin.

Blind pursuit of a unsucessful strategy is a poor military policy indeed. Redeployment is not only NOT retreat, it is an essential military tactic. History is full of examples.

If the enemy's objective is to tie us down in his kind of fight in a prolonged guerilla war to bleed of us resources, damage our military credibility, and reduce our readiness, . . . then we win by dis-entangling ourself, hitting them again on our terms and being ready for the next fight. The one thing a superpower cannot afford to do is to be surprised and unprepared as in Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

Two issues:

1. The Taliban are a Pakistani thing that has been sucessfully contained, but not yet eliminated in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their elimination needs to be completed but it won't happen in Iraq. It will have to be done where the Taliban actually are, by special forces and it will take a LOT more cooperation from our "allies" the Pakistanis who have not allowed us to go in after Osama--who is also not in Iraq. There are no Taliban in Iraq nor have there ever been. There is no evidence of any Pan-Arab Taliban conspiracy.

Our enemies in the Middle East are fragmented. Our best policy is to keep them so. Not unite them against us in some sort of 21st century crusade. Such a venture could not succeed and its payoff would be nowhere near the costs of such a thing, even if it could.

2. Every country in the Arab world is controlled by a strongman. Most are secular rulers. Only the Iranians and the now-defunct Taliban government in Afghanistan are ruled by islamic radicals. When we leave Iraq (and sooner or later we will leave) another strongman will emerge. Because of the Iranian-backed Shiite majority this strongman will probably be an islamist instead of a secular Sunni. Saddam Hussein may have been a lunatic despot, but he was an enemy of Iran, a secular ruler not allied with the Taliban or Bin Ladin, and an effective restraint on Iran. A Shiite government in Iraq (which we are helping to establish) will be an islamist ally of Iran. The only alternative is for the US to stay there forever, and not even the most hardcore war-hawks are advocating that.

But the good thing is that the Iraqis will have a perpetual insurgency of their own from the Kurds and the Sunnis to keep them from being much of a threat to anybody else. These people have been fighting for thousands of years and they ain't about to stop now. And it ain't our fight. They got nothin' we need.

Every thing you say is true. But so was everything I said.

"Every country in the Arab world is controlled by a strongman,"-- Saudi Arabia is ruled by a King.

"most are secular rulers."--The King is not a religious mullah. Saudi Arabia is deeply religious including its laws, very true. But the King is still a secular ruler.

"Only the Iranians and the now-defunct Taliban government in Afghanistan are ruled by islamic radicals." The King of Saudi Arabia is not by any means an islamic radical.