[Greybird]

Privately, those in the "Arab Street" are mostly angry at us, the infidel, for preempting what they themselves would like to have done.

This one sentence signifies the insane heights of neoconservatives' self-delusion about this Iraq Crusade -- better than any other I have read.

We will end up smashing Iraq. And it will come back to haunt us, especially when the U.S. taxpayers rightly balk at spending tens of billions annually to put it back together again. And we walk out with a job half-done, again. And we get what happened in 1979 in Iran, again -- doubled and tripled, and fueled by an "Arab street" that is far, far from loathing despots as such.

[Miss Marple]

Spreading your particular brand of cheer again, I see.

Some things are more important than money; national security and the rights of a people are two that spring to the top of my mind.

If we do NOT go into Iraq, loss of national prestige, spiraling oil prices, and increasing vulnerability to terrorism and WMD will make the economy tank and taxpayers won't be very happy about that situation, either.

We are in a "pay now, or pay more later" situation, thanks to Clinton's malfeasance. We must act now.

[FreedomPoster]

>>We will end up smashing Iraq. And it will come back to haunt us, especially when the U.S. taxpayers rightly balk at spending tens of billions annually to put it back together again.

This could very easily come to pass, and deserves consideration and discussion.

We are going into Iraq, and I believe it is the right thing to do, for a long list of reasons that I don't want to discuss here, now.

What is not being talked about much is How are we going to deal with Iraq after the war? If we bail out a la Afghanistan, things might be better than antebellum, but this surely will not yeild a long-term optimal result for the U.S.A. We should examine the aftermath of the last conflict where we defeated an adversary and turned that adversary into a long-term, productive ally. That would be WWII, and there were two adversaries, Germany and Japan.

In both cases, U.S. military proconsuls (MacArthur in Japan, Maxwell Taylor, Lucius Clay, and others in Germany) ruled those countries with a velvet gloved iron fist until they were ready to become democratic republics. We guided them along the way, and only let them run their own affairs when it became clear they could/would do so in a manner acceptable to the West.

I see this as the only rational model for dealing with Iraq post-bellum. Regarding the cost issue, it could be funding with their oil, while still leaving plenty of oil with which to upraise the people of Iraq and improve their civil infrastructure.

The problem is, Do we have the will to do this, or will the Left demand instant "Democracy Now!" for a people totally unprepared to handle same. Do we have the will to silence any radical Islamist rabble-rousing of the young males? And I mean *silence*. Do we have the will to comprehensively prohibit the many unacceptable-to-Western-culture aspects of Islam, while our own anti-American left is screaming "human rights abuse!"?

Or will we undertake half-measures and do little but create greater problems for ourselves in the future, as Greybird obviously fears?