?For everything there is a season. . .? sayeth the Bible. The season has come for Americans to look homeward. Instead of continuing to spend billions in Iraq, let us husband those our hard-earned tax dollars and spend them here at home. The Iraqi people must slowly find their own way now. Further U.S. dictated deadlines are counter productive. We cannot force-feed democracy to Iraq. To keep large numbers of American soldiers in Iraq much longer only earns the United States more enmity, reinforcing our unfortunate global image as conqueror not liberator. The Iraqi people must begin to take it from here. In fact, there is no longer a ?war? in Iraq. We started that conflict and we met the goals established at its outset. Now there is a slow, festering, internal political struggle pitting Shiite against Sunni, against Kurd, which will play itself out, perhaps for decades, until it either devolves into outright civil war or resolves into some sort of compromise which suits those who live in the country of Iraq. We
