For how many years should we keep 100,000 troops in Iraq?

Question

For those who support Bush, please answer this: what if we are just helping prolong a civil war, and in fact our presence is actually fanning the flames of a civil war? What if for every terrorist we kill, two more spring up in his place? Do we just stay there forever? What would have to happen to acknowledge that we are not helping the situation by trying to solve the political problems in Iraq by military means? And if you think we are going to solve them that way, is it reasonable to ask how long do you think that will take? Let's say we are still in Iraq ten years from now, and the situation is still the same. Troops are getting killed, and the parties over there are still killing each other? Should we continue to stay the course?

Answer 1

The U.S. military is training and equipping the Iraqi military and police while running patrols at the same time. The Iraqis have no medical or air support and of course all of that has to be guarded. I would say the military could greatly scale down when the U.S. military doesn't have to do patrols anymore. That should happen in a years time. There were bombings in the South 100 years after the American Civil War.

Answer 2

(1) We are keeping a cap on the civil war in place because we keep the major paramilitaries and the terror groups from slugging it out in style. The last group that tried was the Mahdi Army and we nearly annihilated them in Najaf when they stood up for a direct confrontation.

(2) For every scumbag we kill in Iraq, there will always be a replacement. It's so much easier to kill them in Iraq - which literally has all sorts of crazies paying good money to conduct "Jihad Safaris" out of Jordan and elsewhere - than to hunt them down in the United States.

(3) The political problems in Iraq require military muscle. Negotiations between hardened enemies do not work unless you can enforce compliance. If you want to give a group like the Badr Corps or the 1920 Revolution Brigades reason to disarm, you're not going to do it by sweet-talking them. You're going to have an inclusive political solution in place that they can agree with, AND the military muscle to punish them for non-compliance.

(4) The situation will not be the same in Iraq 10 years from now. The will of the American people to sustain the war, or the logistical cost of sustaining the war for th American military, one or both will break the camel's back. Eventually, the Americans will leave, and barring some sort of miracle where there is a REAL pan-Arabist Iraqi government with legitimacy and popular appeal, the major paramilitaries, the strongest tribal confederations, the various terror groups - all of them will slug it out and carve out Iraq. It is a given.

Answer 3

NONE this is OUR Presidents War and he should fight it himself not our boys.