Why They Should Stay

I apologize for the delay in posting, I've been out of town. As I've said before, subscribe to my RSS reader to make up for my skirmish-ness.

Allow me to briefly delve into foreign policy. The Economist had a very well organized argument in their cover story last week.



From a slightly different perspective, but perhaps a more pertinent one, economist Thomas Sowell articulates the mistake of Iraq--and the disaster it would be to leave.

If nothing else comes out of the Iraq war, it should banish the concept of "nation-building" from our language and our minds. "The track record of nation-building and Wilsonian grandiosity ought to give anyone pause," as was said in this column before the Iraq war began...


You cannot turn a territory and its population into a functioning nation with the stroke of a pen or the drawing of lines on a map.

Real nations evolve over time out of the mutual accommodations of peoples, not by imposing the bright ideas of theorists from the top down...


This is not a plea for withdrawal. Whatever the situation when we went in, international terrorists have chosen to make this the place for a showdown battle. We can win or lose that battle but we cannot unilaterally end the war. It is the terrorists' war, regardless of where it is fought.