Andrew Sullivan makes the perfectly reasonable point that Iraq is not South Korea, or Japan, or Germany. He says that if American forces could stay in those countries for 100 years, the same may not be true of Iraq, a country at the heart of a Muslim world:
There is no way an Arab Muslim country will tolerate Western troops permanently based on their land – without constant war and threat of war. To believe otherwise is to engage in a “holiday from reality.” We’ve done enough of that. The future of a permanently occupied Iraq is less likely to be Japan than the West Bank. And the deeper we are stuck there, the more our predicament will become the awful, morally corrosive, soul-sapping experience of the occupying Israelis.
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