Not long from now, a horrified American people will suddenly ask "What have we done?".

Our decades-long effort to undermine the mullahs of Iran has now made them more powerful than ever before, and the entire region, from Egypt in the west to Pakistan in the East, including nations such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and even Kuwait, are now more threatened than ever by the rise of Islamic extremism. In Egypt's recent elections, the outlawed Islamic Brotherhood made huge gains. Jordan's pro-western government is hanging by a thread. There is much unrest in Pakistan, which has nuclear capabilities. Israel is now more threatened than ever before. And Iraq? That nation is in the beginning throes of a civil war which most likely will last generations. All this caused by the worst military blunder since Augustus Caesar sent his troops into Germany to be massacred 9 years before the birth of Christ.

This result of this horrific blunder is now going to require a massive US military presence in the Middle East in order to keep the region semi-stable, and will cost billions of dollars each year, which we do not have, in order to keep the region from completely exploding. At the same time, we are going to have to work very hard to restore our image, which is now in tatters throughout the world. While I agree with the Bushneviks that the UN may be irrelevant, the rest of the world, as it exists OUTSIDE of the United States, certainly is not. It matters what they think of us, because if angered enough, the rest of the world has the power to turn us into a third world nation in a heartbeat through their own form of economic sanctions.

Whether we stay in Iraq or whether we leave, whether immediately or in stages, many more of our soldiers are going to die. They are dying and will continue to die because we conducted a military campaign which will be written in history textbooks of the future as how NOT to conduct a war. It does not matter whether this war was moral or not, nor do the reasons for it matter either. The way this war was conducted was a huge military blunder of earth-shattering proportions. The military strategy itself was flawed from the beginning, as was the overall strategy of establishing our presence in the Middle East by invading Iraq.

Nonetheless, if we want to attempt to stabilize the region, we will have to stay. As John Murtha already suggested, before he was dishonestly attacked by those who would prosecute this war to the last drop of other peoples' blood, we need to pull out of Iraq, while still maintaining a presence in Kuwait. At that point all we can do is wait out the civil war in Iraq, and the potential impending slaughter in the region, as various extremist groups vie for power for Iraq as a nation, and the Middle East as a whole.

Not long from now, a horrified American people will suddenly ask "What have we done?".

Based on this article.