I will borrow freely from an article in the San Diego Union Tribune by Mark Bowden, as it seems to make some sense to me. It is herein full.
I suggest this be read from Barack Obama's perspective that he expressed in the last debate, the bus was driven off the road when we went to war in Iraq, and we can't rewind that event, we can only do the best with what now exists.
Obama's attraction is that he does not give the impression that he is an ideologue, stuck in the truisms of the left, but looking for answers beyond those limited by the party faithful. Ironically, this is also the position of his opponent, John McCain.
The other perspective on this question is vast cost of this war so far, express in the new book "Three Trillion Dollar War." Given what we have paid in the proverbial blood and treasure, and worst, what we have inflicted on the innocent Iraqis, exactly what is our obligation going forward.
Here are some elements of the article with my comments, which will be followed with a poll for your feedback.
As someone who supported the invasion because I believed Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, I have since been proved wrong. The invasion was not justified. After some initial success, the adventure without question went badly. President Bush clearly failed to plan adequately for nation-building, and kept the number of U.S. forces there to a catastrophically ineffectual minimum.
For a time, it appeared as though Iraq was irrevocably bound for civil war and chaos. Failure and its costly and dangerous consequences for the region and our country seemed the only possible outcome. It was during this period that liberal opinion in this country congealed and dried. It still frames the positions of both leading Democratic candidates.
The writer was deluded by the belief that there were WMD, and along with the majority of Americans felt the risk was great enough to go to war. And, in spite of the image that has grown around Obama, he was uncertain himself that he would have voted against the Iraqi War Resolution, had he been faced with an up or down vote, as the Senators were.
But time has a way of moving on, and history is full of surprises, both good and bad. The news from Iraq has been good since Bush supported a "surge" in U.S. troops last year. The military effort to crack down on the insurgency has been remarkably successful, a conclusion I reach not only on the basis of official statements and news reports, but also on my own correspondence with Iraqis and Americans there. A dramatic turnabout has occurred.
In January, the U.S. death toll was 40, down by more than two-thirds from what it was in January 2007, and the civilian death toll is half of what it had been. Sunni and Shiite factions that had been attacking U.S. troops have joined forces with Gen. David Petraeus and have been helping to track down and defeat the vicious fanatics. While Iraqi lawmakers have fallen short of the political benchmarks sought by the Bush administration, they have recently passed a budget, a provincial governance law, and an amnesty law for some former Baath officials that required a degree of cooperation considered unrealistic just months ago. These steps suggest that ethnic and religious divisions there may not be intractable.
It is certainly possible that these gains are illusory and temporary, and that hopes for lasting stability and a working democracy will unravel, but it is also reasonable to suppose that moderate Iraqis have glimpsed the abyss and are backing away from it.
And here he is suggesting something that will not sit well with the values of this site, but perhaps they should. To the degree he makes sense, that he describes the sentiment of the voters of the general election, our overriding concern must be to get the Democratic candidate elected.
In politics, too much importance is placed on consistency. Candidates who alter their positions risk ridicule and attack. But only a fool never changes his mind. One of the central complaints about Bush, from both liberals and conservatives, was that he persisted in his Iraq policies long after it was clear they weren't working. To his credit, the president belatedly reversed course. He may have done so in time to save the whole effort.
When either Obama or Clinton becomes the party's nominee, he or she will compete against Republican Sen. John McCain for the votes of not just die-hard anti-war Democrats, but all Americans. McCain is someone who supported the invasion from the beginning and who became loudly critical of Bush for not committing more troops to the effort. Last year, he took a strong and politically courageous stand in favor of the troop surge, and so far events and U.S. soldiers have proved him right.
If that trend continues, and most of us hope it will, McCain's steadfast conviction that America can and should prevail in Iraq will look mighty appealing to the general electorate. Democrats uniformly opposed the surge a year ago, and have so far ignored its success, but their message will sour badly if current trends continue.
Three trillion dollars for this war makes it the second most expensive next to WWII. While we look at the current force levels of around 150K persons, over the five years of this war there have been over a million who have served, and been injured both in mind and body. And counting only the dollars to treat them, ignores their suffering, and of course we don't even count the Iraqi dead and wounded.
The recent meeting between the leaders of Iraq and Iran is a profound event. It shows, ironically, that events in that area are no longer in the control of the United States. One thing is certain, Saddam Hussein would never have been a party to such a meeting. This is momentous because it shows the failure of the entire goal of Bushco's venture, a subservient Iraq that would be subject to the U.S. will.
But in his failure, it could possibly be the world's gain. The lost of life between Iran and Iraq has been immense. Both country's have a tradition of intellectualism that has always been there, in spite of dictatorships both secular and religious. Is it possible that this segment of society, one based on law and enlightenment could rise from the ashes of this war?
We should never have driven the bus into the ditch. But we did. Now history will judge us on how we get it out. How we leave the region that we have transformed forever.