The situation in Iraq is something of a paradox. As long as the US is there, the insurgents won't stop fighting, and of course, as soon as the Insurgents stop fighting, the US will leave.
We are not serious about doing anything about Iran, nor could we if we even wanted to. The US wasted every scintilla of political capital it had in Iraq. What are we going to sell the war on? Especially when we know there is no chance at all of a quick victory, or a quick easy exit.
And how do we know Iran actually has any more WMD than Iraq did? We were 100% sure Iraq had them too, remember?
Seriously, it's time to take our ball and go home.
BTW, as soon as we do, the US is not going to want all these armored trucks and humvees any more. They are hideously uneconomical to run in peace time. We knew they were neccesary for an insurgency from the Vietnam war, yet we retired all those and didn't replace them as soon as we left there too. The US didn't even bother to maintain .50 cal gun shields on our APC's or other vehicles because of the extra weight and expense. We ditched it all.
We will do the same again this time. Wait and see. Armored Humvee's use much more fuel and due to the increased weight are harder on parts as opposed to regular ones. In peacetime, they're budget killers. Same with armored supply trucks. So all that money allocated for armor, will end up being totally wasted as i bet in the end tons of it ends up being sold for scrap. If we're lucky, the military will at least put some of it in long term storage.
And the truth is, had we conducted this invasion properly to begin with, and especially the relatively peaceful window after the invasion was concluded, we wouldn't have needed all this armor anyway, and the war would've been over 5 years ago.
"Wow, talk about unhinging ourselves."
~Gen McKiernan, CFLFC (Iraq), 2003.
History repeats itself once again.
PS: The most ironic part of all this mess, is that D. Rumsfeld (aka Dumnamara) pledged to "Transform" the US Military into a "lighter, more strategically mobile, more agile force".
Well, anything but has happened. Since OIF, we have replaced light Infantry units with much heavier Stryker units. We have replaced thousands and thousands of light, highly strategically and tactical mobile Humvee's and trucks with much heavier, far less mobile armored versions, and introduced an even heavier version of the M-1A2SEP Abrams called "TUSK" (Tank Urban Survival Kit).
Of course these are all good things individually IMO, but they sure didn't make the force lighter and more strategically mobile!
I cheered the day Rumsfeld finally stepped down. It was a great day for America. It was he, faaaaaaaaaaaaar more than any other single human being, that pushed for the stripped bare US invasion force, at every step of the planning. He is the one that cancelled the deployment of 2 full US heavy Divisions after the end of the Invasion, at a time when they were absolutely the most useful, right after the fall of Saddam, when the power vacuum was at it's greatest. I honestly believe that Rumsfeld has supplanted McNamara as the worst SecDef in US history.