Billmon

Billmon has some interesting thoughts about withdrawing from Iraq:

I didn't go to the big anti-war demo in Washington today -- and not just because I have the normal responsibilities of a middle-aged parent with a house, a mortgage, a dog and a backyard that badly needs mowing. I could have evaded all of those things. I decided not to go because up I've been deeply conflicted about the morality of supporting a rapid U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq.

That is, up until now.

I opposed the invasion of Iraq -- from the moment, in the summer of 2002, when it became obvious Bush had made up his mind to overthrow Saddam's regime. It didn't take a degree in Middle Eastern studies to understand what a Pandora's box of sectarian conflict and strategic instability Shrub was about to open, and you didn't need to be a pacifist to see that the moral and legal case for war was deficient to the point of criminality.

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Some withdrawal advocates simply want to see American soldiers taken out of harm's way, and are indifferent to Iraq's future, which they believe was never our business to begin with. Others are trying to fit the war into an ideological template they've cherished since Vietnam, in which the U.S. is always the imperialist aggressor and the insurgents are always the people's champions. Still others don't want to admit that a neo-colonial occupation could ever be the better alternative (or the least worst one, anyway) even for a fragmented Third World nation on the brink of civil war. Most, I suspect, are simply trying to find a path out of the swamp, and are picking and choosing the arguments that look like they might get us there without too many more deaths on our conscience.

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Go. Read. Think.