If O'Hanlon had any brains, he'd get a better haircut.

As a practical matter, you can't withdraw a 150,000 troops and equipment, safely, in less than a year. I think most people understand this.

My view is that Democrats should support the continued presence of US troops in Iraq to provide stability, but insist that every dollar of expenditure in Iraq be funded by new taxes, skewed to the wealthiest.

Demanding immediate withdrawal would make the Democrats look weal when Iraq becomes a greater mess when US troops leave. The fact that the mess is due to Republican mismanagement and negligence during the first several years of the occupation will be lost to the public in view of Republican attacks about "surrender."

But if every new dollar spent in Iraq is tied to new taxes, even Republicans may grow weary of the endeavor.

Besides, we civilians at home owe it to the troops to pony up to support their mission.

If Democrats want to take principled stands, they need to build a media empire comparable to the Republicans' to uphold their message against the cultural and media tide. Until they do, only pragmatic, not principled, stands are viable.

hey Iraqis! if you don't get your act together soon, we'll wait!

ga-rone-teed results!

Jose,

And you know this how?

There was a plan for evacuating Vietnam in three days.

How long did it take us to get into Iraq? If you are talking about dismantling the permanent bases we've been building then yeah, it will take a year. No way would a serious bugout take a year.

This is exactly right, except for the part about the public's backbone. It isn't the public's job to make decisions as to the duration of a major overseas military commitment. It can indicate its sentiment, and has done so, but at some point elected officials need to act on it.

What elected officials are actually doing is looking for the path of least resistance, and least resistance in the short run at that. American casualties in Iraq have been down of late, and pictures of violence there have appeared less often on television; therefore, the intensity of public interest has declined. But the cost of the war hasn't declined, and the question of whether even the best possible outcome in Iraq is worth that cost has barely been asked. If at some point the cost of the war becomes salient in the public mind -- this might happen before November, or it might not -- some people in Congress might respond to this development. Until then, they'll just react to what they see and hear.

Elected officials want to be as close as they can be to public attitudes in their constituencies, without leaving too many hostages to fortune in case those attitudes change. There always has been and always will be pressure for any elected official, at any level, to view this as what his job is all about. If representative democracy is to work, though, that can't be what the job is all about. We'll always have some legislators, and Presidents, who are looking out for themselves and their positions first, and looking out for the country afterward. If most of them are doing this, then the country has a problem, and one that's a lot bigger than the fiasco in Iraq.

Great discussion!

Can we leave Iraq now?

KD: "Or does he only support it now, when it's a way of staying in Iraq?"

My guess is that he supports it now, as a way of staying at the Brookings Institution.

Tripp: "No way would a serious bugout take a year."

It of course depends on what is brought back, and on the conditions under which withdrawal takes place. I've seen estimates from military guys that are in the neighborhood of one to two years, under optimal conditions in which we bring out all of the important hardware.

It all gets back to Bush waging a costly war while cutting taxes and using a volunteer military. The solution would be either for higher taxes or a draft. Both would really get our attention.

Hey, I came into your house and smashed up all the furniture because your neighbors attacked me, but he was hiding in the basement and was too hard to find.

Now clean up this damn mess so I can leave. Oops! Just knocked over another vase. What's taking you so damn long?

JM,

You can't be telling me that under optimal conditions (which I'd guess would mean no aggression towards us and the cooperation of the Iraqi government) it would take two years to get the important equipment out?

What the F do we have over there that takes that long to move? A space shuttle that must be moved by the crawler-transporter? What the hell is that doing there?

Excuse me, but didn't the Decider in Chief list a bunch of benchmarks, including new elections and the passage of specific laws, when he announced da surge in January 2007?

What happened to those? How come NOBODY is holding Bush accountable for the benchmarks he himself cited in a televised speech?

The United States stays only if Iraqis accelerate their own political efforts at reconciliation.

This is insane, given that many of the Iraqis who would be involved in this political reconciliation want first of all for the United States to leave their country.

It would be just as fruitful to say "The United States leaves only if Iraqis accelerate their own political efforts at reconciliation."

There is an economic concept called "sunk costs". In theory, sunk costs should not be considered against future decisions... because they're sunk, unrecoverable regardless of the decision. A rational decision would only consider future costs against future benefits.

Nonetheless, many, perhaps most people still do consider sunk costs. Think of the gambler who loses almost everything, yet continues gambling in an effort to get some of it back, even if the odds of winning have not changed. Or the entrepreneur whose business is consistently losing money, yet stays in business to try to recoup those losses, even though business conditions haven't changed.

It's irrational because those who consider sunk costs believe that their existence somehow affects future probabilities. Minor successes, even when just data noise, (for the gambler, for the entrepreneur, for citizens deciding about Iraq) only reinforce their beliefs about the relationship between sunk costs and future decisions.

The sunk costs in Iraq are huge. Citizens don't want to lose them. But we'd all be better off if we just looked at future costs versus future benefits of staying in Iraq.

It all gets back to Bush waging a costly war while cutting taxes and using a volunteer military. The solution would be either for higher taxes or a draft. Both would really get our attention.

Yes it would. Tax-wise I wouldn't just tax the wealthy, I would tax EVERYONE. Figure out how much this thing is costing us in a very detailed way and how much revenue we need to maintain it and levy a National Sales Tax for whatever amount it will take to cover it. Make it a law that the Iraq War Tax has to be printed on EVERY receipt that you get for everything that you buy. So, EVERYBODY can see how much it is costing them every damn week, every week. We pull out half the troops, and the cost is cut 40%, then reduce the tax that month by the same amount. All of the citizenry needs to really really know how much this is costing us in REAL TIME.

What an odd, odd piece by O'Hanlon. One presumes he imagines himself writing as a defense intellectual describing what is in our national interest. And yet what he actually betrays is his animosity toward Democrats who don't share his view (e.g., Obama and the Congressional leadership). That's why he touches on Bush's and McCain's positions lightly and mostly in passing.

But in describing what the Democrats should stand for and do, it hasn't seem to pass his notice that the Democrats have had no influence on policy on Iraq since they took over Congress. Might an objective defense intellectual maybe, just maybe, emphasize what the President, our Commander in Chief, should do? Bush (and McCain) show no sign of supporting the "tough love" that O'Hanlon says is vital. The fact that that is such trivial interest to O'Hanlon says all we need to know about what his true agenda is.

O'Hanlon has done good work on defense issues in the past. That he so clearly lets his prejudices show tells us a lot about how Iraq has caused him to lose any and all sense of judgment. Clearly, he is no friend of most Democrats but far more important, he has abdicated any role in might have in helping lead a reasoned, sane discussion on what our nation's policy should be toward Iraq.

I know putting "pressure on Iraqis to make progress" feels good for the tough-minded US pundits and politicians, partly because it shifts blame. But how likely is it the incentives are aligned with those who can make the relevant decisions?

Those factions who think they need our protection, might be motivated to action by threat of us leaving. But for those factions that oppose our allies: they ostensibly want us to leave - threats have no, or a negative, effect (might postpone any planned cooperation).

I don't see how a plan that motivates certain factions, while discouraging opposing factions, helps create political progress.

Seems like more bullshit from people who can't face what they created, can't think of a way out, and still insist on tough posturing that it's "those recalcitrant Iraqis" fault.

I haven't a clue, but it needs a solution that gets the parties invested in the final solution, and leaves them out if they don't play along. Give Iraq 1 trillion dollars US to move the population into homogeneous regions, or create three states. Give the biggest players tons of cash to buy into the new system, and nothing if they don't.

At the very least, we should send the war cheerleaders, neo-cons like O'Hanlon, and the Brookings' Saban Center for the ME, over to Iraq to personally administer the plan.

Tripp,

Check out the link below. Scroll way down to a post titled "Walrus the logistician." I don't have military experience, so there's no way that I would venture a guess as to how long a full withdrawal would take.

I should add that the author of the website (Pat Lang) has several other posts in which he cautions readers to be aware that a full withdrawal simply can't happen overnight.

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/the_military_art/index.html

Benchmarks? You wanna ask about benchmarks? Benchmarks? [as of 24 January 2008] From the Center for American Progress:

Total Benchmarks: 3 of 18 Accomplished
On the one year anniversary of President Bush’s State of the Union address justifying his "New Way Forward" in Iraq, it is clear that the surge has failed to meet its objectives. One year ago, the president pledged that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced." Despite the fact that the Iraqi government has only met three of the 18 benchmarks laid out last year, an end to U.S. military and financial commitment is nowhere in sight.

The purpose of the surge was to provide the “breathing space” for political reconciliation to occur. Yet over one year later, political progress has been scant, and what progress has been made is not durable. The Iraqis have not made the difficult political compromises necessary for national reconciliation, and an indefinite U.S. presence in the region will not inspire them to do so. Despite the best efforts of our military men and women in creating a temporary lull in violence, substantial advancement toward a sustainable and independent Iraq has not been made.

In order to motivate Iraq’s political leaders, the United States must set a date certain for withdrawal. Only then will the Iraqis make the difficult political compromises necessary for national reconciliation. While redeploying our forces over the next 10-12 months, the United States must initiate a diplomatic surge to ensure that all of Iraq’s neighbors are involved constructively in Iraq’s future. Only by implementing a Strategic Reset in Iraq will the United States be able to take control of its own national security interests in the country and the greater Middle East.

Benchmarks? What a joke.

I don't have military experience, so there's no way that I would venture a guess as to how long a full withdrawal would take.

It could take anywhere from "as long as it takes to drive to Camp Doha, Kuwait" to "we will prudently withdraw 1 brigade a month."

They don't have a clue as to how long it will take because they don't have an arrangement to dispose of the weapons, vehicles, and facilities that they would have to abandon. Do they sign it over to the Iraqi police? Do they make sure they don't hand over the equipment that is broken down and parked? [i.e., the Bradleys and M1s that sit for lack of spare parts.]

If the military WANTS to get out fast, they'll get their asses out of dodge. If someone decides to make political hay out of it and drag-ass, they'll take forever and a day to withdraw.

Do they make sure they don't hand over the equipment that is broken down and parked?

Well, that's really my point where "hardware" is concerned. What gets brought out and what doesn't?

I would imagine there are some serious cigar-chomping arguments going on in the Pentagon on precisely this issue. There are likely to be reasonable (though costly) arguments that all of the "big shit" should be brought back. M1s aren't cheap, after all.

The sunk cost argument above resonates with me. But what about the "intelligence losses," for lack of a better phrase, that would be associated with leaving lots of stuff behind?

I suppose we could just ship a new M1 to Tehran and get it over with.

O'Hanlon: That is where a more conditional Democratic approach comes in. The United States stays only if Iraqis accelerate their own political efforts at reconciliation. This is admittedly a complex matter to evaluate accurately, but that is OK — Iraqis will get the message even if it is somewhat inexact and imprecise.

So, O'Hanlon agrees that we should withdraw support if they don't make progress, right? He must be aware that if they don't make ANY progress, the situation could be horrible, with millions of Iraqis killed and hurt and millions more refugees. There is certainly a possibility that Iraq will make NO progress toward reconciliation between now and mm/dd/yyyy (whatever date we select) or that they will make so little that it won't prevent a civil war. But O'Hanlon is resolute that we will hang tough and start to withdraw on mm/dd/yyyy.

I don't get it. There's no disagreement here. The set up to apply pressure is already in place. The Iraqi government has until Jan. 20, 2009 to make compromises and pass laws that will enable them to govern their country effectively. At that point, we start a steady, continuous troop withdrawal.

The surge was planned to last for about nine months, and was supposed to provide ample time to hit the political benchmarks. So why not use the natural date of 01/20/2009 as the date for when we start to withdraw troops? What date does O'Hanlon prefer?

"a full withdrawal simply can't happen overnight."

Fact one: It took three weeks to invade against organized opposition.

It would take less time than that to move everyone with all combat vehicles back to Kuwait. Throw in a week for shipping out key spares.

Fact two: staying costs twelve billion a month.
One month's cost would pay for about 3,000 M1-Abrams tanks, more than we've ever had in Iraq.

Now explain why taking six months, or a year, or two years, makes sense once you've decided to withdraw. You can't. Any stuff you salvage by taking extra time can't possibly be worth the extra cost.

Next, explain why 'responsible' Democrats believe this shit. I like to think it's just because they don't know a fucking thing about war and have room-temperature IQs: you know, the same reason that most of them bought into this nonsense in the first place. The alternative is that they're evil or insane: we wouldn't want to think that, so let's stick with ignorant and stupid.

I had a local Republican campaigner knock at my door looking for nominating signatures: in conversation, he, a 12-year Marine, said that of course it would only take three weeks to leave Iraq with all weapons. I've talked to an ex-undersecretary of defense who told me the same thing.

I am puzzled by the estimate of 1-2 years to pull out also. As I recall, we moved in, with quite a lot of equipment, in a few weeks. We have added more people and equipment since, but why would it take more than, say six months?

Next, explain why 'responsible' Democrats believe this shit.

Well, for one, I don't.

You cannot use the metric of an invasion vs a withdrawal. Entirely separate things.

The amount of hardware we would have to leave behind is staggering. I, for one, don't think leaving weapons behind in a country that is already saturated with them is a good idea. We should take ALL the weapons and leave them with slings and stones.

It'll save time when President Pierce Bush invades Iraq in the Spring of 2032.

OK, folks, like I wrote, I've seen estimates from military guys that indicate a long time for withdrawal. I'm not making such an estimate myself.

Sorry for this very long post, but I've lifted the following directly from Pat Lang's website. Read it and weep.

"Iraq exit logistics" de Borchgrave

"Watching them drive by at 30 miles per hour, would take 75 days. Bumper-to-bumper, they would stretch from New York City to Denver. That's how U.S. Air Force logistical expert Lenny Richoux described the number of vehicles that would have to be shipped back from Iraq when the current deployment is over. These include, among others, 10,000 flatbed trucks, 1,000 tanks and 20,000 Humvees.Even in an emergency, said Col. Richoux in DefenseNews, the evacuation of 162,000 troops in 23 ground combat brigades and millions of tons of equipment would take some 20 months. Military shipping containers, end to end, would stretch from New York City to the gates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The main resupply route for convoys that runs 344 miles from Kuwait (skirts Basra to the north) to Baghdad is already under the constant threat of hit-and-run insurgency attacks, including improvised explosive devices. Driving empty, on their way back to pick up another load in Kuwait, convoys are just as vulnerable. Arnaud de Borchgrave

-----------------------------------------------------------

I guess it was to be expected that a journalist who flew into the airstrip at Dien Bien Phu the day the French paratroops seized the place would take an interest in the hard realities of military operations. Nevertheless, I am gratified and grateful that he has written this very useful piece. It tells the story so well that I am relieved of the burden of trying to write it myself. As I said at the Miller Center last week, I was an intelligence officer but always was "logistics driven" in my thinking.

The Democrats who talk about leaving about leaving Iraq by the end of 2008 are as deluded as the Republicans who think that Iraq is South Korea.

The United States can not afford to run helter skelter for the door in Kuwait. There are a myriad of geo-political reasons why that is true, but looming alongside that set of reasons is the fact that we can not afford to depart militarily in other than an organized, rational, carefully planned way. To do otherwise is to court a collapse of the internal situation into a chaos that would make present events seem mild.

And then there are "our things." As De Borchgrave explains, there are a vast number of armored vehicles, trucks, Strykers, and aircraft in Iraq that the United States can not afford to lose. These things need to be brought back to the US for factory re-build so that the taxpayer's money will not be wasted buying analogous equipment. Pacifists will argue that it would be better to leave the equipment because we should "study war no more." That concept is as unrelated to reality as the Jacobin flathead view of a homogeneous mankind.

The road out of Iraq will require several years for a safe passage. pl

JM,

Basically if we needed these troops in some other fight somewhere else on Earth we are screwed for two years?

Why must all of them be driven from Iraq in single file to Kuwait? And that is under the threat of attack, not the optimal situation you spoke of.

Why can't some be taken through Syria and Turkey to the Mediterranean? Could some be flown out from the Green zone? The idea that they would crawl along at 30 MPH in some single file convoy all the way to Kuwait sounds preposterous, and even that would take only two and a half months. What will they do in the other twenty one and a half months?

I think they fear that a quick evacuation would look too much like a retreat. Either that or our equipment is in much worse shape than we've been told.

" The road out of Iraq will require several years for a safe passage. "

A lie, as was that entire article cited. Obvious, since it took only three weeks for our armed forces to invade and conquer Iraq against organized opposition. Withdrawal is actually easier than attacking enemy armored divisions, odd as that may seem.

An entire heavy armored division takes 100,000 short tons of shipping capacity. With three brigades to the division, we have about six division-equivalents of combat troops on Iraq right now (19 brigades) - but they're not all heavies. So the real tonnage number (for actual war-fighting equipment) is more like 400-500,000 tons or less. Not nine million. Those real numbers tell you how long it takes to move things back to the US by sea. As for just getting to Kuwait, just drive the vehicles out. The highways are decent.

You may wonder why the US government is promulgating obvious falsehoods about the difficulty of withdrawing from Iraq. I wonder why anyone pretends to believe them. My working hypothesis is the same as I said earlier.

As for the non-working fraction of armored vehicles, blow them up. It's cheaper than staying another month.

Tripp,

"Single file at 30mph" is just a metaphor. The basic issue is that withdrawing is an immense task, and that the time it takes depends on a myriad of other decisions (e.g., What do we bring back? What do we leave behind? Can we bring out people and gear through countries other than Kuwait?)

Someone above mentioned that it only took 3 weeks or something to invade. Yes, but it took months to get everything into place before we invaded. (I suppose the transporter room on the Enterprise was a bit too small.) And we've been bringing shit over continuously since then.

What we need is one of those Cat-in-the-Hat machines that cleans up the place before mom gets home.

JM,

You coulda saved time by stating you were arguing by metaphor. I sure hope Pat Lang the Intelligence officer provided a little more than metaphors when doing his job, although that might explain how we got into this mess.

"See the thing is, heh heh, I never said Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Heh heh. I said it was like he had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Heh heh. It was your fault for believing me.

Since the real number of tons to be moved is approximately 20 times less than the nine million tons mentioned in that article, the time required is also 20 times less than that claimed.

Look, this is propaganda. It's false. The idea was to shore up support for continued occupation of Iraq by exaggerating the difficulty of leaving.
You can check out the numbers yourself and I urge you to do so: logistics isn't relativistic quantum mechanics.

To be fair, some of the logistics geeks quoted in that rash of articles last summer about the impossibility of ever leaving Iraq were just crazy. My favorite was the guy who thought we couldn't leave till we'd shipped out all the toxic waste barrels at Camp Anaconda.

Tripp,

Why save time? I've got plenty of it. And I love arguing by metaphor, and by candlelight, for that matter.

Although I'm not really interested in defending or refuting Lang's opinions, I will say that my take on him is that he's an old-style conservative who thinks the neocons are crazy and destructive and that invading Iraq was ill-advised. He's also long since retired, and had nothing to do with the current debacle in Iraq.

gcochran,

Where did you get a figure of 9 million tons?

Driving to Kuwait gets us out of the war. It takes longer to bring the tanks home (troops fly), but that's no big deal. Now why would someone conflate those two steps? Because they were silly?
Uninformed?

Well, doing so gives the impression that ending the war takes years, which is the impression some people want to give.

Hmm...seems that a confusion exists over what constitutes "withdrawal."

On one end of the "spectrum," there's the notion that "withdrawal" means just getting American troops outside the borders of Iraq, and then flying them home. Fine. Leave the tanks, or put them on ships, blow them up, scuttle the ships with the tanks on them, whatever.

On the other end, "withdrawal" might mean getting everything - equipment, Burger King cash registers, everything - back to its "original location" or to some other semi-permanent location.

Take your pick.

As near as I can tell, the American public is still roughly in the same place it's been since at least 2005: in favor of withdrawal within a year or two, but when that year or two is up, still in favor of withdrawal within a year or two. On that score, O'Hanlon is just the echo of a deeply conflicted public that doesn't have the backbone to make hard decisions.

How so? (And haven't we had this exchange before?) Maybe the public has the sense to know that an orderly withdrawal that doesn't add to Iraq's woes will take a year or two to execute.

I was for withdrawal in 2004, and 2005, and 2006, and 2007. But it doesn't mean I want to instantaneously beam every U.S. soldier in Iraq back to the U.S. tomorrow, because pulling the rug out like that would be a new disaster on top of all the old ones.

I still want us to withdraw over the course of a year or two, to minimize the repercussions. What's so conflicted about that?

Once we're a year into the withdrawal, I'll expect it to be finished up in the next 6-12 months, if it isn't already done. But that will make sense only because we've already been withdrawing.

Nine million tons was the estimate in Newsweek last spring (April 23), from Fletcher, head of the US transportation command. But he's a man under authority. I'm not. I noticed that all of our tanks in Iraq weigh 60,000 tons, 1/150th of that nine million. Throw in _all_ the Humvees and we're up to maybe 1/90th.

We can get almost all of our combat power out of there in less than a month. Tanks can be driven and they don't even need to use the highway, since I hear someone invented treads a few generations ago.

to low-tech: uh, just exactly what repercussions are we going to minimize by drawing out withdrawal? When we leave, we won't be running Iraq: the winners will be determined by the local power equation. I guess if we keep building up the Sunnis we could make the coming civil war fairer: is that what you want? Do you think that the locals will learn the true meaning of democracy if we invest another year and another hundred billion? Maybe we can teach them all about habeas corpus!

I think that a lot of people think that they might lose face, lose political influence if the project that they cooked up or even just went along with is formally declared bankrupt. Personally, I'd like to _maximize_ that kind of repercussion.

I like this timetable:

"The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 9/8/03: Last February, with invasion just weeks away, sources in the Bush administration told Newsweek that they were expecting a postwar occupation of Iraq of 30 to 90 days."

What's the frackin' point of benchmarks anyway? Every time any kind of benchmarks have been created, they have been deliberately vague and/or later dismissed as not terribly important.

Or, has been noted above, let's say that 3 out of 18 benchmarks sort-of have been met (debatably so) within the required timeframe. Where are the consequences of not having met them?!

Time and time again, we've been told that success is just one more Friedman Unit (FU) away (6 months). Six months goes by and nothing's different, save that another hundred billion dollars has been flushed down the toilet, several hundred more soldiers are dead and thousands wounded for life, and more people are PO'd at America worldwide.

Benchmarks are meaningless unless there are actual consequences for them not being met. So far, the only consequences have been "stay put."

Even in an emergency, said Col. Richoux in DefenseNews, the evacuation of 162,000 troops in 23 ground combat brigades and millions of tons of equipment would take some 20 months.

And yet we somehow got 150,000 plus troops in about two dozen ground combat brigades into Iraq in a matter of weeks.

The main resupply route for convoys that runs 344 miles from Kuwait (skirts Basra to the north) to Baghdad is already under the constant threat of hit-and-run insurgency attacks, including improvised explosive devices. Driving empty, on their way back to pick up another load in Kuwait, convoys are just as vulnerable.

So? We were under heavier fire from an actual army on our way in, and we managed to accomplish that in much less time. Our forces already in place are already under the constant threat of hit and run rebel attacks. Our convoys which move through the country now are just as vulnerable. Why is this somehow an argument then against leaving?

The United States can not afford to run helter skelter for the door in Kuwait.

Why?

There are a myriad of geo-political reasons why that is true,

What are they? Don't merely assert, but explain.

but looming alongside that set of reasons is the fact that we can not afford to depart militarily in other than an organized, rational, carefully planned way.

Well, we invaded and occupied in other than an organized, rational, carefully planned way. So why not be consistent and leave the same way?

To do otherwise is to court a collapse of the internal situation into a chaos that would make present events seem mild.

Why? Again, explain, do not simply assert.

And then there are "our things." As De Borchgrave explains, there are a vast number of armored vehicles, trucks, Strykers, and aircraft in Iraq that the United States can not afford to lose. These things need to be brought back to the US for factory re-build so that the taxpayer's money will not be wasted buying analogous equipment.

Since we're wasting billions a week there, obviously anyone who advocates staying is not really motivated by a tender concern for the taxpayer's money. The cheapest thing to do would be to leave as fast as possible.

Pacifists will argue that it would be better to leave the equipment because we should "study war no more."

What pacifists? Who? There may be a minute minority who think that, but the fact is that the vast majority of this country thinks we should withdraw, and very few of them are pacifists. Again, this is simply creating a straw man.

That concept is as unrelated to reality as the Jacobin flathead view of a homogeneous mankind.

Have you been drinking?

JM,

Why save time? I've got plenty of it. And I love arguing by metaphor, and by candlelight, for that matter.

I can tell you love arguing by metaphor. In case you care, it makes you look either ignorant, foolish, or dishonest.

Argument by metaphor is really argument by analogy and a false analogy is an informal fallacy applied to inductive arguments. You assume the analogy is correct to prove your point. If the analogy is incorrect you are using argument from fallacy which is a formal fallacy.

For example, I could counter your analogy with one of my own - withdrawing from Iraq is as simple as a leaf falling from a tree in the fall.

I won't do that because it is a waste of my time and yours.

This is all simple high school debate stuff that dates back at least to Aristotle but there is no shortage of amateurs spouting their fallacious arguments on the internet thinking they are making a point.

Unfortunately the point they are making is not the point they think they are making.

As De Borchgrave explains, there are a vast number of armored vehicles, trucks, Strykers, and aircraft in Iraq that the United States can not afford to lose.

If we could not affort to lose them, then they should not be in a combat zone exposed to enemy fire in the first place....