Fear of a Republican President

There's really no other option at this point. That's what happens when you make a dog's dinner out of a precarious situation; all options are bad.

Cycloptichorn

Best to accept our limitations now, and let them handle their own fate. I know our government doesn't plan to do anything like that, with the big embassy and bases, inviting big oil to make deals with the government, etc.

I consider that sort of thinking equivalent to the argument in the early 1970s that we couldn't leave Vietnam because there would be a blood bath. The blood bath, in fact, never materialized, although life was pretty damned harsh for prominent supporters of the Thieu government.

It doesn't matter how long we stay in Iraq, or how soon we leave. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and Iraq now has a majority Shi'ite government, something which has never been true in the slightly more than 80 year history of that nation. The Turks didn't try to make these people live together, and had three separate provinces which effectively separated the Kurds from the "Arabs" (they're only Arabs in a loose sense) and the Sunnis from the Shi'ites. When Winston Churchill created Iraq in 1920, his only interest was in controlling the petroleum in Basra, Kirkuk and Mosul. To accomplish that it was necessary to force together Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds, all of whom cordially despised one another. Caring little or nothing for the consequences (a foolishness for which they were soon to pay), the English put the Arabian Faisal on an Iraqi throne, and assured, for whatever their intent (and it appears that they simply gave no thought at all to the consequences), that Sunnis would dominate the politics of Iraq, despite being both an ethnic and religious minority.

With a Shi'ite majority government, Iraq's most logical ally in the region will be Iran, the only other Shi'ite dominated state in the world. With a resurgent Kurdish minority, heavily armed and the veterans of decades of insurrection and outright warfare, Iraq is guaranteed a basis for continuing conflict with and interference by Turkey. It doesn't matter how long we stay, Shi'ites have a lot of grudges and long memories, and now have the ways and means to get their revenge, just as soon as we leave, whether that's now or later. The Turks are going to do everything they can to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish homeland in the region, whether it is de facto and not de jure, and will invade Iraq if they deem it necessary to prevent that, which they have already done, despite our presence there.

Arguing that we have to stay in order to assure the peace and security of Iraq is a fool's dream.

If I see anyone doing that, I'll warn them of your opinion.