For all those who blithely pontificate that all it will take is for Americans to wake up and smell the bullshit (guilty, jeez I wish they would) the Scoop series "US Soldiers to America:
"
Bring Us Home Now! We?re dying for oil and corporate greed!" has an object lesson.
The third article that I link to from the title is with a solid, patriotic, republican who hates what he is doing in Iraq and for what he is doing by confessing to the Scoop that he is wrong.
Here is a guy who can see and hear with his own eyes and ears every day the wrongness of what he has been brought to believe and yet he finds even talking about it extremely painful and it fills him with the most violent anger.
This is what it takes to "change your mind". It is no small task and not easily or lightly done. The effect is that it will take the grinding of some massive wheels before the sleeping, dissociated 56% of the US population gets to the point that this guy is now. It takes, and will take, a world of pain to achieve. It will have to be real pain, not just a headache for a couple of days, but a whole body and soul ache, for a long time.
Those on the left have to understand that their fellow citizens are in for a very rough time and have ways ready to help them through.
On a side note, the appalling anger that these guys are building up will come back with them to the US, where it will be ignored, treated with disdain and left to fester and boil till it erupts. I don't know what's worse, to leave 150,000 troops trapped in Iraq, or bring home 50,000 of them, armed, trained to a hair trigger and really, really angry, with no outlet.
That is not to say that there will be a choice between them, both will occur, and may be part of the necessary world of pain that the US has to experience to wake from its nightmare.