How To get out of iraq?

Suppose everything goes wrong, and the new government of iraq is ready to collapse. A Shia fundamentalist is preaching death to all Americans, and he’s recently allied himself with the head mullah of the Sunnis. The Kurds announce that they will beging efforts to break away from iraq, and have begun to arm themselves. So the US is now faced with the worst possibility. my question: do we graccefully withdraw, or pull out ala Vietnam, 1975?
My belief is that the Bush team is preparing us for such a turn of events, and maybe the Koran desecration story is a way for us to manufacture an “out”.
I’m afraid i’ll wake up some morning and find the new iraqi governemnt overthrown, and riots in the streets…and what if the new iraqi army decides to pack it in?What do we do then?

Naive as I am, I’m still holding out that the US will twig that our presence is now an impediment to peace and just leave.

Turn left at Syria?

I’m not really sure how the Quran story plays into this discussion.

The answer will be, “When we can pull out and it will be a better place for Haliburton!!!,” or when mothers and fathers tire of seeing their children come home in a box.

“One, two, three, what are we fighting for…”

Was that before or after the flying pigs?

Strange bedfellows, you know?

Don’t worry, as soon as we leave they’ll resume fighting each other.

First of all: who are we fighting…fundamentalists of Islam?..terrorists???

We are subjecting our men to fight with one arm tied behind their backs…We can’t just back out and leave…The only way to get out of Iraq IMO is to invade Syria, Iran and stop the continuous flow of insurgents that leave both countries to fight the US and the peace loving Iranians.

I"m certain I’m in the minority here…but either go full bore or get out…The way it is now this war will go on for years.

You forgot Saudi Arabia:
Martyrs in Iraq Mostly Saudis

That’s like saying the best way to put out a barbecue fire is to throw some liquid oxygen into it. It’ll get the job done, but you’ll end up torching the whole kit’n’kaboodle in the process.

Gee, I remember a bunch of folks were saying that before the war, and got pooh-poohed as “Nattering nabobs of negativity” (and other equally silly names).

We won’t see any exit during this administration. Should the government collapse, the US occupation authority would resume. The exit will come when President Dean, swept into office in an anti-war landslide, decides to stop the carnage.

or go South Saudi Arabia, take a right.

Apart from it being total fantasy as you dont have the troops to occupy Iran and Syria, your logic will then lead you on to invade Pakistan and Lebanon to stop insurgents crossing into your new conquests. Remember the first rule of holes, when you’re in one stop digging.

Precisely. I bet right at the top of OBL’s Christmas Wish List is USA to ATTACK IRAN OR SYRIA, right below the crossed out USA TO INVADE IRAQ.

I don’t know how we are going to get out, I just wish we would. We are not wanted there. My best friends son just lost a friend (I had only met the boy once) who was 20 years old and left behind a 6-month-old son. He lived for 7 days with burns over 75% of his body.

I am tired of this, and I am sad. It might be different if I thought we were making a difference, but I don’t have that consolation.

Sadly the basic answer to the OP is just ‘the same way the US got out of Vietnam’.

How To get out of iraq?

The way things are going I don’t think it’ll be much of a choice. IOW, short of burning Iraq in order to save it – a la Fallujah – you’ll have no choice but to pull out.

Of course, you can always claim “mission accomplished” while doing so.

Good question. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_insurgency:

Fox News (and Sky news in the UK) still has lots of infographic maps. just use powerpoint to turn the arrows around.

I think that claim has already been made a couple of years ago.

I believe that that “Mission Accomplished” was getting Saddam out of power.

I still have the cynical belief that Iraq is a grand, strategic “recon by fire” designed to lure Islamic militants out into open action, where they can be seen, combatted, captured, interrogated, etc., as opposed to just leaving them alone and wondering when the next attack on American soil will come.

As far as geting out of Iraq?

Well, if we leave while everything’s still a mess, we just open the door for either another Saddam-type to step in and sieze power, or for Iraq to dissolve into total civil war ala Bosnia-Herzogovinia.

If we try to gut it out, how long before the next “Abu Ghraib” burns what little (if any) support we might have away? We don’t have the firepower to fight some 26 million pissed-off Iraqi’s who don’t want us in their country, regardless of how they feel about each other, or what they plan on doing to each other once we’re gone.

Since we created this mess, we have some moral obligation to try and fix it; unfortunately everything we seem to do right goes largely unnoticed and unremarked by the Iraqi’s, the world, and even many Americans. Since we should have never “broken it” in the first place, the little good we’ve actually done has been mitigated (almost?) entirely by Abu Ghraib.

Since we pissed-off the U.N. in creating this mess, we can’t turn it over to them; they wouldn’t touch this with W in office with a 10-meter pole. If a Clinton/Dean-type got elected, maybe, maybe intense diplomatic efforts on his/her part could convince the U.N to step in.

But even that may not be sufficient; cries of “Western Imperialism” ring in my ears just thinking about it, unless the U.N. Peacekeeping force was predominantly Muslim. And just look at how Syria treated the displaced Palestinian refugees over the years to guess how well the Arab world will treat Iraq as a “Peacekeeping Force.”