This may not be a particularly new insight for people here, but it has become increasingly clear to me that we will not withdraw from Iraq. The war planners and 'international energy policy' architects (who happen to be the same people) think that if we leave, we essentially surrender forever our ability to control any significant new source of oil. Forget about democracy, Saddam, or threat of attack, Iraq was the low hanging fruit of untapped oil reserves, the easy win, and that is why we went there.
If we do not have direct control (through private oil companies) of some major source of oil when things get tight due to peak oil - game over for us. We will be at the mercy of countries in the middle east and russia to provide us with oil and natural gas so we can continue to grow food in the current industrial ag fashion, drive our gas guzzlers, heat our homes, produce much of anything, or defend ourselves with a mechanized military. This is a fight about who controls the energy and a desperate attempt to make sure we're not left begging for the energy source on which our current infrastructure depends.
Obviously things have not worked out at all as planned, and now we are even more vulnerable to oil-based retailiation than we were before. Countries that might have helped us in the past are less likely to now. There was certainly another clear path to energy security before this all started, but I doubt energy dependence or international cooperation was brought up at Cheney's secret energy task force meetings. No, they drooled over a map of Iraq as they carved up the oil fields to decide which company gets which fields.
As I see it, we have two choices: (a) We either stay there until we do control the oil fields - and in the meantime continue to bankrupt the government and shift tax money to military contractors and equipment manufactururs so that we can have some hope of maintaining our oil-intensive way of life. Or (b) we must begin to decrease our DEMAND for and use of energy now. If we don't take control of the the oil, then we can't sustain this level of energy use even with all the solar panels and ethanol we can produce (those all take oil to produce, by the way). A significant side benefit of downshifting our energy consumption would be reduced greenhouse gas emissions from US, the biggest polluter in the world. As a first step, as simplistic as it sounds, banning the incandescent light bulb in the US will buy us some time to figure the rest out. Believe it or not, running buildings uses more US energy than transportation by a factor of 2.
Conservation, reduced energy consumption, and great strides toward energy independence now are going to have to be the major emphasis of any presidential candidate that hopes to get my vote. Otherwise, we are indeed walking into an endless war over who controls the oil.