Reply #29: well, in part because we destroyed the country

[Orangepeel]

we destroyed the infrastructure, toppled the existing government, and let in actual Al Qaida and Al Qaida allies who are determined to take over the country turn it into a fundamentalist dictatorship that really does support and fund terrorism.

I was firmly against an invasion of Iraq. I never believed it was an imminent threat to the US, I knew that Bin Laden thought that Saddam was an infidel and that Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9/11, and I believed that war with Iraq would make us less safe because there were real terrorists we should be dealing with instead.

But I don't think that we can abandon Iraq now. It is our responsibility to try to help fix what we broke by rebuilding the infrastructure, safeguarding an elections process, and helping to provide security to the Iraqi people as they try to put their lives back together.

Now, I do think that we are doing a piss poor job of all of that. We need to give up control to someone else, even as we are bearing the brunt of the expense, and we need to stop bombing these poor people NOW (which of course, is already way to late).