Reflections of a stormy petrel

Whether or not it was right to originally invade Iraq - and I have given my reasons to think that it was - to abandon it before uprooting Al Qaeda would be insanity. Whether or not it distracts anyone's attention from Iran (a funny kind of distraction, having one's troops right on the border), it has been shown often enough that the Arab mind has a limitless ability to transform any defeat that does not amount to total annihilation into a victory. Israel ground Hezbollah into the ground last year, with all Hezbollah's friends and supporters yelping for a ceasefire, a ceasefire on any conditions; now, merely because Hezbollah survived Israeli attentions in some kind of form, the whole Muslim world is convinced that the war was a Hizbollah victory. The same astonishing phenomenon was seen when the PLO was driven out of Lebanon and its leadership had to board a boat from the harbour of Tripoli to Tunis; just because Arafat and his cronies did not actually die, the whole Palestinian world, and soon the whole Arab world, perceived this as a PLO success. This bizarre mentality would insure that, if the US ever leave before the job is done, Al Qaeda would quickly become a dominant force in Iraq. Which would make the strategic menace posed by the backward, feudal and endangered NWFP and Afghan marches look like a joke. This conflict is not territorial. You cannot point at a place on the globe and say, "if we eliminate them there, we eliminate them everywhere." The enemy will only redeploy - or rather, metastatize. And to leave even the impression that the mighty USA have left Iraq out of weakness would be to lay a grand red carpet to every enemy of the West into the land between the rivers.