Reply #5: I was originally for keeping forces in Iraq but realized it causes more problems than it solves. [View All]

Who's attacking the Kurds? Well, other than Turkey which has launched a few excursions into their territory and feels threatened by a more independent Kurdish region and the possibility of them providing support for guerrilla separatist groups for the Turkish Kurds.

Turkey like Iran has also seen hard liners become more dominant since we invaded Iraq. In addition to elevating the tensions in Iraq, we've elevated them in the surrounding regions. That is another reason to withdraw our troops.

It makes absolutely no sense to me how keeping 20,000 to 60,000 troops in Iraq for a year or two is going to keep the peace longer or better than the current 160,000 combat troops. According to the Iraqis and the non-Shrub cooked Pentagon stats, the surge isn't working. You'll have the presence of the US troops inflaming the Iraqis, as the poll indicates they do, but you'll have an even lower number of troops than already there during the surge to protect themselves and non-coms. Our troops would become more of a target.

It seems to me for any other plan to work, we'd actually have to hold a draft and bring in 300k to 500k as were originally proposed by the semi-sane generals. However that plan has absolutely no chance of passing at this time. It would make more sense to pull out all the troops instead of a slow burn like we did in Vietnam that was so costly in terms of lives.

The reason that other candidates support residual troops is that it is the popular position. From one of the latest Gallop polls:



If after the Petreaus media blitz dies down and if the poll numbers change, you can expect the candidate's positions to change.