The Iraq War

I have not been in favor of pulling the troops out of Iraq immediately because I believed that once we were there, we needed to leave the place better than when we arrived. However, when people like Rep. John Murtha stand up and say we should do an immediate withdrawal, you have to stop and think. He is a former Marine Corps Colonel and a veteran of the Vietnam War.

According to the article:

Murtha's call for a withdrawal may have a significant impact on the debate over the future of the Iraq war, as both Democrats and Republicans seek his advice on military and veterans' issues....

Murtha, who has served in the House for over three decades, is the senior Democrat and former chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee and voted in favor of the Iraq war. Now, he said, the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq are "uniting the enemy against us."

"Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty," he said. "Our military captured Saddam Hussein, captured or killed his closest associates, but the war continues to intensify."

I guess it forces us to ask the question - when are we finished over there? If we leave now, will Iraq fall back into a dictatorship and put us back at square one?

Of course, then there's the argument that if they do, they do, and it's none of our business anyway. But we went there and took responsibility so don't we have to see it through to the end? Maybe we shouldn't have done that, but we have, so now what?

No easy answers, huh?

UPDATE:

Comments like this (link to article) do not help:

"They want us to retreat. They want us to wave the white flag of surrender to the terrorists of the world," Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said.

This such a ridiculous distortion of what is being suggested. It's part of the fear mongering which lead us into this war in the first place. Removing troops from Iraq is not surrendering to terrorists. Plus, Rep. Murtha specifically says that we have to redeploy the troops. He's not talking about surrendering to terrorists. Hastert is an idiot.