Iraq: Three questions

Should we stay or go? If we stay, how should we do it? If we go, how do we leave?

It's been my opinion that we should stay. We went in and messed things up; it seems like it's our responsibility to clean them up. Plus, if we leave, it seems likely that the situation will be less favorable to our interests, both as a source of regional instability and as a significant and meaningful blow to our reputation, than if we stay and manage to make the country better.

But as our prosecution of the war and the Iraqis' management of their country have failed to improve (or at least failed to yield improved results) and insurgency has slid into civil war, it seems less and less likely that we'll be able to make the country better. So, I'm moving reluctantly more toward favoring pulling out. I don't think I'm all the way there yet. It's just that, while I never thought imposing democracy would work, I thought some sort of stability, some sort of miracle, might have been possible. As the situation continues to deteriorate, I'm hard-pressed even to conceive of such things as possible.

That is, at this point, my best solution--both in terms of providing a complete solution (and it always was the best method for that) and in terms of realism--may be for the United States to redouble, or re-treble, hell, re-quadruple, research into time machines. That way, we could go back and avoid getting into the whole damn mess, like we should've done from the start.

I won't reach the other two questions here, but I will pose one more: What do you think? (Alas for the seeming demise of the comment system.)