Befored I say anything, I have to say this.
There is a special place in hell for whoever came up with the term "cut and run", and lesser places for everyone who uses it. All it is is semantics intended to lower the level of debate. This is a complex issue with HUGE reprucussions, and we need to be able to discuss it frankly and honestly, which is impossible when, if you explore a series of possible actions you are immidiately labeled as wanting to "cut and run", which actually doesn't mean anything, but to whoever said it, they think that they've made a point, and the stupider people watching that discussion may also think whoever said that is the point. Regardless of the stance you take on the war, bullshit phrases like that are inexcusable.
That being said, I don't think we should pull out of Iraq. We are in a global war on terror, and that will continue after we leave Iraq, and if we leave Iraq before we've gotten them on the right track to a stable democracy, we will have suffered a HUGE loss in the war on terror.
It will fall apart, and with that, so will anything that resembles an infrastructure. And as we've seen globally, places of severe desparation are terrorist breeding grounds. Madrasas will rise up everywhere, not to mention terrorist training facilities (because if we're not there, who's gonna get rid of them?). Huge levels of terrorist recruitment, not to mention countless other resources that terrorists will gain.
It's obvious that we've ****ed up in Iraq. We shouldn't have disbanded the national guard, and we should've IMMIDIATELY gotten to work replacing their infrastructure at the very second that Baghdad fell. But that's in the past, so we can bicker about that all we want, but we need to keep the past in the past, and the future in the future. When we're discussing what we should do in Iraq, unless there's a lesson in our previous failures, our previous failures are irrelevant.
We're making progress. We've got a region that's under Iraqi control (I think I heard that), and it's a very slow domino effect. Iraqis control a region, then our military there doesn't have to be spread so thin, and we can send the troops who were in that region to another region, until another region becomes stable and self sufficient, and as we go we'll have fewer areas we need to fix, and the same amount of troops to do it. What is essential is that we also leave an infrastructure, not just a police and military force, in our wake, or else the military gains will either have to be extremely repressive, or doomed to fail eventually.
I've noticed there've been a lot of comparisons to Vietnam, and I think they're misleading. These comparisons held more water initially, when Paul Bremer was heading up their government, and refused to let the elected officials pick who they wanted. This is because the lesson that we should've learned from Vietnam is that you can go into a nation and instill a democracy, but you're s.o.l. if you don't like who they pick. That's something I think Bush is beginning to understand, that Iraq won't be a mini-US, even in the best possible scenario, it will be Iraq, and there will be aspects of their government that we won't neccisarily agree with, and we sort of have to bite the bullet at say "Ok. As long as it's free and democratic, that's all we ask."
But we can't leave Iraq. Say what you will about our initial causes in entering Iraq, but no one can deny the catastrophic effects us leaving would have, not only on the Iraqi people, but on us, and everyone else on our side of the global war on terror.
