No Exit

When Valerie Plame was outed by the Bush administration, many assumed it was because of her husband's criticism of the Bush administration manipulating his report following an investigative trip to Niger to look in to claims that Saddam was trying to purchase "yellow cake" uranium there for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons. As a result of this act of treason, the company that Ms. Plame worked for, Brewster Jennings was effectively put out of business as a world wide monitor of WMD. But
apparently Ms. Plame was outed in retaliation for Brewster Jennings intercepting a shipment of VX nerve gas being shipped through Turkey into Iraq by the military to be planted in Iraq as evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
I remember the first time I saw James Howard Kunstler on C-SPAN (I think) giving a critique on the poor design of public places in the US. It was a fascinating speech, and I had no idea who this guy was but in the middle of this he offered his opinion on why we were heading for Iraq. "We need oil, and we need to put a police station in the Middle East to insure that we keep getting that oil." That was all I heard from this guy until I discovered the Clusterfuck Nation Chronicles while visiting What Really Happened and started viewing the eyesore of the month at kunstler.com that I put the two together. But that's why we are in Iraq. In order to continue our wasteful lifestyle of more and more useless materialism, we need to keep the oil coming into this country and to that end, we will not be leaving Iraq until every drop of oil has been sucked dry from the vast oil reserves there. Kuwaiti wells are beginning to run dry (that's why Saddam invaded Kuwait in the first place, they were slant drilling under his oil fields) and so we need a "friend" in the Middle East to keep the oil flowing.
And that's why Cheney chose Bush to be his pigeon. Here's a guy who can't even find his way out of a hotel following a press conference for Christ's sake, how is going to find his way out of a quagmire like Iraq? Then there are the beer swilling flag waving brain damaged monkeys who in their misguided machismo think we ought to stay until every Iraqi citizen or American soldier is killed which will happen right about the time that all the oil is gone at current consumption rates. Add to that all that the scripturally demented Bible thumpers who think if we secure the MidEast for Israel then Jesus will come back and they shall all go to Heaven no matter how many deaths they have caused doing so, and you have a good picture of why we're never leaving Iraq.
And you can't really paint this as a Republican-Democrat thing because according to a
Newsweek survey 74% of Americans support an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, while the House voted 403 to 3 in favor of keeping the troops there with no exit strategy. So we have no represenative government any more, but I'm sure that if most Americans knew that in order to pull out of Iraq they'd have to give up their sport utility behemoths, they'd want to stay the course no matter how many lies were used to trick them into supporting the invasion.