What Bush (and Kerry) fail to explain in their exit strategies. . .

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is how the military is expected to do all of the things they want them to do before they can leave.

There will not be anything at all resembling a democracy after the next 'election' there or beyond in the power-sharing constructs of the constitution they have drafted. Further, there will almost certainly be a Shiite-dominated authority holding most of the power, with the Kurds holding on to some measure of autonomy in the north, and the Sunnis struggling to regain some sort of control over their own destiny in the face of their utter defeat and removal from decades of power under Saddam. And there is the prospect that the U.S. will have to engineer some sort of propping up of the Sunnis to prevent the emergence of a theocratic rule that will almost certainly come from within the newly formed Shiite-influenced government.

Our military can prop up on faction or the other in Iraq, but our soldiers can't create the political stability that Bush and Kerry seek as a price for their return home. Any U.S. plan that relies on the military to achieve any of these political goals that Bush or Kerry want at this point is an invitation for a widening war as we saw in Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam war. One more shifting of a political line on the map, at the expense of more of our soldier's lives, before they claim whatever victory they imagine there.

The Iraq invasion and occupation has been an utter failure. The Iraqis have managed to form loose coalitions around a constitution guaranteed, for the most part, by the heavy hand of our military. Our U.S. military is guided by the rules and constructs of our democracy. It's amazing to me that our politicians are still tolerating our troops being asked to fight and die at the behest of one faction or the other in this completely un-democratic process. The Iraqis will ultimately pit themselves violently against each other in their perpetual struggle for dominance and power. Our troops shouldn't be left to stand between them.