Iraqi elections unlikely to lead to satisfactory result

The Iraqi national assembly elections are now only four weeks away. The Sunni's largest party have just pulled out. The conditions on the ground are so bad that campaigning is impossible and even if the elections go off without widespread violence, (a big stretch by any measure) it is likely the government that will result will look less like Jefferson and more like Khomeni; and will lack legitimacy besides. So we have to ask the question, what was the point? Tens of thousand of people are dead, Iraq is wrecked and the U.S. is now viewed as a unilateralist bully. If the sole purpose of this adventure was to remove Saddam Hussein then we could have left 1300 dead American soldiers ago declaring victory. I can't imagine that the Iraqis, left to their own devices, could have possibly screwed things up as badly as we have. In all likelihood, if Iraq had not had its army dismissed and instead had a government made up of Iraqis, the insurgency ball might never have gotten rolling. So now we pin our hopes to a Shiite cleric and his promise that a Shiite-dominated government wouldn't be autocratic and religious. Our exit strategy, never very well defined, now seems to be that we'll leave when we can. Good plan guys! The chance of a decent outcome now seems highly unlikely. This means that our soldiers, our money and our reputation in the international community have all gone for naught. As for the Iraqis, they have been and will continue to be the worst victims of this foolish, poorly planned and incompetently executed operation. The bottom line -- George Washington remains as sagely today as he was when he warned against foreign entanglements. Our priorities today are so backwards that we waste billions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting a war of our own making half way around the world, but can't fathom the concept of securing our own borders. We have a military to protect the country, but instead they are protecting Germany from Russia and Korea from itself. As for protecting America? No tanks, no soldiers; we create a massive federal bureaucracy full of technocrats to look over our shoulder as we check out library books as thousands of foreigners pour across our borders unchecked. What was it that Jim Traficante used to say on the floor of the House, "Scotty, beam me up!"