I'm trying to keep track in my own mind of what our reasons are for staying permanently in Iraq.  Unfortunately, I can't do it!

Retired General William Odom wrote in this piece published July 17th that staying in Iraq is preventing us from reaching our long-term goals in the Middle East.  I think he is right, and this has set me thinking about what is going on.

Recent reports indicate that the insurgency we are fighting is primarily Iraqis.  They believe we are an occupier intent on colonizing Iraq in order to take their crude oil for ourselves.

So, every day we stay in country we reinforce that idea.  Worse, we are actually constructing permanent bases.

The claim that we are occupiers, backed up by the evidence that we are building permanent military bases serves to increase the number of insurgents fighting to liberate Iraq.  Their numbers are further increased every time we kill an insurgent because we mobilize revenge seekers.

Based on all of this, we can only win in Iraq by killing the entire population.   If we embark on this course, defending Iraq will become a religious necessity for Muslims, and we will eventually have to kill every Muslim world-wide.

So, General Odom has it right - we either suffer the short-term tactical defeat by withdrawing, and in the process preserve our long-term strategic goals, or we embark on a campaign of genocide, and lose our strategic goals for the foreseeable future, and in the process become what they claim we are.

Writing it out in this manner makes the decision seem too easy to me.  How do we get our "big thinkers" to see?