You know, if this administration, and its partisans, had just told us from the start...

"Look, we made some mistakes, but they were honest mistakes, and now we're in too deep to just back out and leave our friends in Iraq holding the bag. We need more money, more troops, maybe even a draft, and we still have a chance of sorting this mess out and fulfilling our original mission, to develop a friendly democracy in the middle east as a counterexample to the jihadists and Al-Quaeda and as a counterbalance to Iran and Syria. There is still time to turn this around, while we still have the upper hand."

...those of us who originally supported this war might still be willing to give it a chance to succeed, and to work to convince the skeptics to perservere a bit longer. But no, all we got was lies, excuses, evasions, stonewalling, insults, arrogance and even a refusal to alter tactics because it might be interpreted as an admission of incompetence or a concession to criticism. Now the situation has been allowed to deteriorate (yes, allowed!) to the point where it is not physically possible to correct it. We don't have the troops, the money, the materiel, or the domestic or allied support, not to mention the Iraqi support. We ran out of time and we are redlining our war machine.

All we have is a pointless continuation of the war to prolong it long enough so it can be handed off to the next administration to lose, just to protect the reputations of the strutting little carpet salesmen who masterminded this fiasco and to allow them to claim in perpetuity that "victory was within sight until the appeasers took over". There is no shortage of reasons given why we have to be there, and it seems like they come up with new reasons daily why we should be there in the future, but not one good reason now why we should have gone in in the first place.

Listen up. The Iraqi people no longer want us there. Our well-intentioned bungling has brought a plague upon their land. They want us out. That is all the reason we need to leave.