....What scared me is there are folk, mostly conservative Republicans who seem determined to involve us in another such misadventure....
BINGO! ....and they're STILL frothing for war with Iran! It's going to be interesting to watch how hawks like Huckabee, Santorum, Rubio, Graham, and others will present their position for another war to a war wary public. More war is becoming an increasingly hard sell to Americans, believe it or not.
I agree, once there we should have stayed. Though we could have stayed 100 years and as soon as we pulled out it would all begin falling apart.
When's the last time you looked at
the debt clock? We can't afford to be occupying and 'nation building' other countries.
U.S. Troops Are Leaving Because Iraq Doesn't Want Them There Oct - 2011
"...Obama campaigned on ending the war in Iraq but had instead spent the past few months trying to extend it. A 2008 security deal between Washington and Baghdad called for all American forces to leave Iraq by the end of the year, but
the White House -- anxious about growing Iranian influence and Iraq's continuing political and security challenges --
publicly and privately tried to sell the Iraqis on a troop extension. As recently as last week, the White House was trying to persuade the Iraqis to allow 2,000-3,000 troops to stay beyond the end of the year.
Those efforts had never really gone anywhere; One senior U.S. military official told National Journal last weekend that they were
stuck at "first base" because of Iraqi reluctance to hold substantive talks.
That impasse makes Obama's speech at the White House on Friday less a dramatic surprise than simple confirmation of what had long been expected by observers of the moribund talks between the administration and the government of
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, which
believes its own security forces are more than up to the task of protecting the country from terror attacks originating within its borders or foreign incursions from neighboring countries.
In Washington,
many Republican lawmakers had spent recent weeks criticizing Obama for offering to keep a maximum of 3,000 troops in Iraq, far less than the 10,000-15,000 recommended by top American commanders in Iraq. That political point-scoring helped obscure that
the choice wasn't Obama's to make. It was the Iraqis', and a recent trip to the country provided vivid evidence of just how unpopular the U.S. military presence there has become -- and just how badly the Iraqi political leadership wanted those troops to go home.
Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, for instance, is a hugely pro-American politician who believes Iraq's security forces will be incapable of protecting the country without sustained foreign assistance. But in a recent interview, he
refused to endorse a U.S. troop extension and instead indicated that they should leave.
"We have serious security problems in this country and serious political problems," he said in an interview late last month at his heavily guarded compound in Baghdad.
"Keeping Americans in Iraq longer isn't the answer to the problems of Iraq. It may be an answer to the problems of the U.S., but it's definitely not the solution to the problems of my country."
Shiite leaders -- including many from Maliki's own Dawaa Party -- were even more strongly opposed, with followers of radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr
threatening renewed violence if any American troops stayed past the end of the year. The Sadr threat was deeply alarming to Iraqis just beginning to rebuild their lives and their country after the bloody sectarian strife which ravaged Iraq for the past eight and a half years.
The only major Iraqi political bloc that was willing to speak publicly about a troop extension was the Kurdish alliance which governs the country's north and has long had a testy relationship with Maliki and the country's Sunni and Shia populations. But even Kurdish support was far from monolithic: Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish lawmaker considered one of the most pro-American members of parliament, said in a recent interview that he wanted the U.S. troops out."