Iraq...

Okay, let's say these democrats in congress and the senate get their way and every uniformed man and woman is pulled out of Iraq today. What'll happen? I'll spell it out for you...

The terrorists that we're fighting over there are a very patient bunch. As soon as the last soldier leaves, what do they do? They kill everyone over there who supported the new Iraqi government and the new leaders. Then they set up another Saddam or Taliban type regime, and they start making chemical/biological/nuclear weapons again, and then it's only a matter of time before said weapons make their way into a New York subway and blow it up, or some skyscraper in Atlanta and blow that up with truck, or maybe even wherever the radioactive cloud might decide to drift. You don't think these people are a threat? It is their stated goal to kill every single infidel they run into, Americans in particular. And this is why we should not pull our troops out of Iraq until, and not a second before, the new Iraqi government can defend itself with it's own troops.

It's not a "quagmire", the troops are not "broken, living hand-to-mouth". Hell, even Democrat senator Joe Lieberman, who has been over there himself several times, says that it's a great success over there. So why don't the people of this country see the success? Think the media might have something to do with that? "Today, another car bombing outside of Baghdad", "10 more Marines killed in Iraq today", "Another roadside bomb struck a humvee as..." etc. etc. etc. What about the good news of which there is plenty? Do you ever hear or see or read about the new schools, the democratically-held elections, the growing economy, the new jobs being created? Nope, the way the media portrays it, you'd think every freaking neighborhood in Baghdad gets blown up at least once a week when they're getting sattelite dishes! Is it bias, laziness, or concern of ratings? You pick...

'Alright smart-ass, why did we go to Iraq in the first place?'
Read the 9-11 commission report and all the other damn reports. It has been proven that not only did Saddam HAVE weapons of mass destruction himself, but he's funded Al-Qaeda and others linked directly to Osama Bin Laden.

'But it's not worth the cost of 2,000 American lives!'
The men and women that, and I stress this, volunteered, for the armed services understood the situation over there, and what they were getting into. They signed the contract knowing the great possibility that they could be sent to Iraq.
Compared with past wars, this one's pretty damn tame.
The 42,000 people that die from car wrecks every year in the U.S. also signed a "contract" with the government (getting a driver's license), knowing there's a possibility they could crash in fiery ball of mangled metal when they go down the road.
Hey, maybe we should pull the citizens out of the road! An equally stupid suggestion to pulling out of Iraq, folks, and that's the news! Thank you and good night! D:

Murtha's proposal (which has been very much misreported) is probably the most reasonable approximation to what we want.  After elections, pull our troops out of hot zones.  Let the government handle it after the elections.  Keep marines in Kuwait so as to have a quick responce to emergencies in the area.  The emerging government won't be very pretty, but at least it will be a real Iraqi government, instead of an American colony.  The cost of having Iraq be a shitty place to live in does not outweigh the cost of having to be it's crutch for the next three years.

The 'terrorists' that we're fighting over there are Sunnis who are pissed off about American occupation.  Technically, half of the attacks over there are not terrorism.  We're dealing with people who are attacking military targets in an attempt to thwart colonialism.  Most of these attacks aren't even being claimed by terrorist groups, it's just desperate people fighting for the wrong cause.  We can stop a lot of this violence by not helping them think they're going to be defending their home from us.

There is no realistic scenario in which this economically broken economy will ever be able to develop weapons in the forseeable future.  That's an absurd scenario.

The reason we went to Iraq in the first place was to dismantle Suddam's weapons program.  We did so prematurely.  Instead of sending in troops to dismantle the government, we should have strongarmed weapons inspectors into Iraq with force.  This might or might not have worked, Bush chose to forgo this option for the sake of a preemptive strike.

Suddam Hussein was a very very bad man.  However, it is not the business of the united states to overthrow dictators for the sake of humanity.  We only needed to dismantle weapons, and instead we conquered the country.  We've helped rebuild the police force as much as we could, but our troops are now causing more insurgency than they are stopping.