RE: Defending the Indefensible: Iraq

But now that it is clear that the reasons for going to war were bogus and that we've created an even bigger mess than the one we stepped into, how can anyone propose to continue down this road??

Whether or not we created a bigger mess than was there before we arrived is highly debatable. You're trying to offer a diminishing returns argument and there is some merit to it, however, you skip over the full impacts of the argument to arrive at the conclusion you held before making the argument. In fact, you assumed the predicate based on your conclusion. If it was the case that we were still essentially occupying a sovereign nation, your argument would have more merit. This would indicate that there was no hope of leaving behind something that wasn't a bigger mess than when we began. This is not the case and if you get your news from somewhere other than Michael Moore, the MoveOn.org website, or the New York Times, there is plenty of evidence of that. The diminishing return comes when we have stayed in country so long that we have created a long-term dependency relationship, much like socialists have done with the welfare state here in the US. We are very close to that point, but I don't think we've arrived.

As for the number of people killed in this action, every death of a US soldier or sailor is intensely painful, but remember what I said: the vast majority of the people serving strongly believe they are fighting a just cause. And, as an aside, more people are killed in the US in car wrecks in a month than have been killed in Iraq since the beginning. Why aren't you demanding a complete withdrawal from US highways?