As Ron Suskind points out in his book on the Iraq war, "The One Percent Doctrine", Republicans since the Reagan era stopped communicating in rational discourse and instead went to adspeak, led by Michael Deaver, an ad man with considerable talent. The practice counts on most people having a very short attention span, middling to low IQ, and no sense of history beyond last week. All you need is an inspiring sound bite, and millions will buy into it. The Clintons do it, too, but when confronted, they also have an intelligent rationale to back up what they're soundbiting.

So don't waste your breath scolding Kit Bond about his past predictions and the failures thereof. He doesn't care. The policy is, Stay in Iraq at all costs. Always has been. It was to be the regional military base for us in the Middle East, which in turn means solid protection for Israel. And if those little Iraqis will just get busy and pass the oil law we wrote for them, we get the oil, too.

So Bush loyalists like Bond will just stay on message and hope enough dupes will vote for them in 2008 that they can keep filubustering in the Senate, and if a Republican manages to get elected president, the war will go on indefinitely, just as they and George Orwell predicted it would.

The distortion of American perspective about the Iraq war is so extreme it defies the laws of physics, and it extends to two quantum levels:

First, conservatives insist on characterizing the conflict as your standard ground war which we must "win", instead of a complex diplomatic, cultural and political mess with a whole lot of multifaceted violence thrown in.

Second, EVERYONE, liberals included, acts as if all the decisions about Iraq are to be made by the U.S. The reality is that of the three wars we are fighting there, the biggest one by far is the war of the Iraqi patriots against the occupying crusaders -- that's us, folks. Every poll since the invasion has shown majorities of Iraqis wanting us to leave, and the majorities are now so large that only the Kurds are against that notion. This is not exactly giving a gigantic power of attorney to us.

If we don't start looking at this situation through Iraqi eyes, then NOTHING we do, liberal, conservative or neocon, will be right. It will just be more disaster.

The Iraqis don't see that we have a big moral duty to settle their civil war, they know they've got to do that themselves -- just as we did in ours. It may be bloody and that's too bad, but it's not up to us to get in the middle because we can't decide whose side we are going to be on, so both sides are shooting at us. That's War Number Two.

Number Three war is the smallest, the war against Al Qaeda, the one the neocons are still yapping about in high dudgeon. There is good reason to believe that the Baathists, who are secular and were trained by the Nazis, with whom they were allied, will kill all the Al Qaeda types once we are gone. The non-Baathist Sunnis will help because they've got enough trouble getting their share of the national wealth and don't have time for a bunch of religious freaks on top of the Shiites. In short, there is a case to be made that when we leave, a big chunk of the violence will just cease. The civil war may, or may not, intensify. We have to understand that we can't do a damn thing about that, not now, not later, not ever.

We certainly have interests that point in the direction of us taking some kind of positive action, and a lot of it, intensively, right now. But that action is not military, not in Iraq. It is almost entirely diplomatic. Plus a withdrawal of our hated crusaders.

Many of the commenters to this article have touched on valid points. In my opinion, it all comes down to this:

Big employers with political pull didn't want to pay the wages necessary for Americans to take their jobs. They got two presidents, first Clinton and then Bush, to reduce enforcement against employers of illegals. In a famous NY Times graphic, the enforcement curve went to zero, as the wave of illegals went to 12 million. Moral: Enforce against the employers, and the illegals will leave. It has happened in all the local communities which have passed and enforced their version of employer sanctions. We don't need a humiliating wall, or militarization of the border, or expensive roundups of the illegals. When they can't get hired, they will go home. We should offer bus tickets to the illegals, and likely millions will accept them.

Then the market rate of pay for those jobs will rise to where Americans will take them. Of course, the cost of the goods produced will go up, too, but not as greatly as you might think. And who knows? Maybe the Republicans will suddenly wake up to the notion that allowing many of those folks back in isn't such a bad idea. Heaven knows the bias of that party against paying good wages.

There may need to be some amendments passed which allow information-sharing between Social Security, IRS and ICE, narrowly confined to evidence of illegals in employment. But I am convinced that a computer-generated letter to offending employers every month, with heavier enforcement when the problem continues, will dry up every job in America to illegals for a tiny fraction of the cost of the remedies proposed by the political parties.

My overriding bias in this discussion is against more population in this country. All economically advanced societies produce lower birth rates, some even have negative reproduction rates. I would much rather raise Mexico and other countries up to that level and have everybody just stay home, while globalization makes everybody affluent.