Here’s the irony in this, and you’ll forgive me if I speak entirely bluntly here: I suspect the vast majority of Americans don’t care about Iraq in the slightest, except to the extent that it has Americans in it. If Bush were to say “screw it,” and brought every single American serviceperson home tomorrow, his ratings would shoot right through the roof, Americans would rejoice, and by and large any concern about Iraq would fall entirely off their radar. Mind you, Iraq would be an unspeakable mess: The Sunnis and the Shiites would fall on each other, Turkey would possibly invade Northern Iraq, where all the Kurds are, and Iran would be happily munching popcorn and wandering in from time to time to make mischief. But those would all be someone else’s problems, now, wouldn’t they? The “Pottery Barn” theory of war is all very nice, but the fact is most Americans would be happy to leave cleaning up the mess to someone else. Sure, everyone else in the world would hate us for it. But they hate us already, thanks to the last six years, and at least this way we’d not be spending billions and having our sons and daughters die for the privilege of being despised.