Losers Don't Leave Iraq - Winners Don't Stay

When the Democratic candidates in last night’s debate were asked whether they were more interested in pulling troops out of Iraq or winning the war, I thought each candidate missed a golden opportunity to re-frame the question. Here’s what I’d have said:

[To the questioner] You’ve spent too much time listening to the Republicans! We’ve already won that war. We invaded Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. Saddam and his henchmen are dead. We invaded Iraq to rid them of nuclear and chemical weapons. It turns out they never had any in the first place. Case closed. We achieved out objective. We won that war. Bush said so on the deck of an aircraft carrier. It’s time to bring our troops home!

The notion that Iraq has to be the main battlefront on the War on Terror is nonsense. If we invaded Easter Island in the Pacific tomorrow, al-Qaeda would show up the next day and want to fight us there. Wherever we go, they’ll follow.

If the United States is truly serious about fighting Al-Qaeda, wouldn't it make more sense to do it on their own home turf, not in the middle of a somebody else's back yard and certainly not in the mddle of a Siite/Sunni/Kurd civil war where our guys get caught in the crossfire?

Wasting time in Iraq is the quickest was for the United States to lose the war against terrorism.