is the modern day inability to handle the concept of sacrifices for achieved gains. Casualties are just a part of a larger economic equation.

To gain access to a resource you commit to a certain number of sacrifices to sustain access. Democracy is swell and fine and we've been the only one to free Iraqis but look at the programmed response here and around the world: "so what?". If 100,000 people leave Iraq for better places per month, this goes unnoticed or is somehow bad news. Yet when the walls fell in Berlin it was "A victory for all mankind!" Which only goes to show that Europe and many Americans are still racist at heart and really do not care about 'dark-skinned' folks as much.

The unsophisticated mentalities here don't really care. Do they care about schools or women's rights? No. They don't give a darn about those either. Here we have the interminal selfish crying about something they don't even begin to understand!

We got folks here who count casualties and attacks. That's it. X number of people died in the past 4 years! None of them yet realize that these casualties are part of the larger sacrifice to our national security vis-a-vis our economic stability.

Iraq is a "quagmire" because X number of US casualties alongside X number of Iraqi deaths! Oh horrors!

Let's look at the production of this "quagmire" and how we've benefitted:

No one ever focuses on that angle.

We've got oil. No not stolen oil. Paid for oil. 655 thousand barrels a day coming to the US as of 9/06. Iraq is our 6th largest provider of oil. We were Iraq's largest paying customer for oil even during the period of sanctions. Right now we are Iraq's ONLY customer - every drop of oil in Iraq is being imported to the USA.
And the oil output is INCREASING only now. In September 2005 Iraq only was churning out 443 thousand barrels per day. Over a 100 thousand barrel per day increase in just 1 year! Every day we are turning Iraq into a more efficient operation providing a large chunk of our energy needs.

Some people would say that's not worth a single life. And philosophically they would be correct. However they would never be hired by a think tank with such notions.

That's success on a major scale. Oh yeah, big time.

Look at our crude oil providers and look at where we are being targeted:

Canada (1,800) thousand barrels a day - STABLE
Saudi Arabia (1,500) thousand barrels a day - QUASI-STABLE
Mexico - (1,500) thousand barrels a day - STABLE
Venezuela - (1,100) thousand barrels a day - QUASI-STABLE
Nigeria - (900) thousand barrels a day - QUASI-STABLE
Iraq (655) thousand barrels a day - UNSTABLE
Angola (648) thousand barrels a day - STABLE
Algeria (450) thousand barrels a day - STABLE

Plus Ecuador, Kuwait, Russia, Colombia, Chad, UK & Brazil for another combined (1,300) thousand barrels per day.

Already Iraq has moved up from 8th largest provider to 6th and if we stay it will be even more efficient, possibly matching Nigerian output.

To folks paid to see and more importantly understand the BIG picture the effort in Iraq pays for itself in economic productivity, commerce, mobility and market economics.

This is what Iraq is all about. Democracy and freedom come as benefits to have the US as your best customer. Other nations will buy oil but care not a whit whether the fields are run as slave labor camps.

Lose our 6th largest oil provider because of a few casualties?! It's preposterous on the face of it. Our enemies know this too and that's the whole reason for the sponsoring the insurgency.

The only way our enemies can ever add Iraq's 800 thousand barrel per day capacity to their own resource suppliers is by turning more US citizens into mindless leftists. That's the ONLY way they can WIN

They need stupidity, feel-goodism, corruption and traitor mindsets by the millions!

How to achieve this?

The media.

That's the media's sole purpose for existence.

Economic warfare and propaganda distribution.

I posted here about the EU commies desire for Iraq to fail, US citizens to become mindless anti-US drones and as I expected not a peep out of the usual suspects here.

It's really too complex for 'average' folks. I understand that.

There will be no "exit" from Iraq as long as there is oil in those fields or until we have secured larger gains from other providers. Period.

All this talk of "leaving Iraq" is for the mindless-drones of the world who count casualties and haven't the wits to understand what's really going on, no matter how many times it has been explained to them.

All we will ever do is reduce our military presence in such a manner as we can sustain our investment and support our business partners.

And as the troops come home, all those leftists can "feel good" about something that really only harms others.

Which is what being a leftist is all about - being a complete idiot.