The way forward has been clear for heading on into a year or more now - quiet the quietest areas, build confidence, train forces and battle season them, build infrastructure and press hard and damned hard for the political side to get into place and learn how to function. Do we expect miracles of Iraqis? Are they, truly, so much more capable than we were that they will do all of that in a mere four years, while under attack from neighbors and suffering from killers that refuse to stop killing?

Yes they live there. That does not magically transform the folks in Iraq into Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Pulaski, Greene, Kosciuszko... liberty is a hard thing to realize after being under the boot of the tyrant for a generation or more. Freedom is hard to grasp at when you have seen people you know or family members raped or killed before your eyes, or put on videotape to be distributed by a maniacal regime. Learning that first lesson of being able to stand on your own and that liberty must be held onto and fought for so that you can be free... that takes a bit of doing. In 1775 most colonists didn't want to be on *either* side and those that did were pretty well divided... 7 years would change that. Long, harsh, bloody years.

A bitter, hard fought struggle with ourselves and an honorable foe.

Helping up a People who have been under no shade of the Tree of Liberty *ever*? Have we really forgotten what that is about and how hard it is to do? The West has failed every time it does not help, does not at least *try* to make something better after a war. We live with those defeats today and they have grown in size and death toll because of our fear of failure... and use money and lives as an excuse to back away. Forgetting the 10% dead of the Nation used to purchase our own liberty when the Nation was tiny compared to Iraq, can we really not understand that?

Capitalism and Communism failed in the Balkans and both have caused more misery in the Middle East because of our fear of cost and strangeness in a far off land. The peoples of that land are neither devils nor angels, although they are bedeviled by hatred, greed and many looking towards despotic Empire so that they may rule over their fellow man.

I would prefer the Nation not fight, but when we do it is forward, completely, nothing left behind, so that we can prove to ourselves that our own liberty means something to us. And that we believe in those lovely words of All men being created equal. We cannot purchase their liberty for them, but we can show them what it means to do so... and the cost of it. That is the price we agreed to pay as a Nation way back when, and we agreed that it was worth that cost of renewal talked about then and ever onwards to this day. Because the cost of not doing so is tyranny emboldened and liberty retreating.

Until we lose our own, as putting a monetary cost on it makes it worthless.

Show us the hell the enemies of liberty have in store for us, Mr. Yon. And the cost of its purchase so we do not lose our own.