Not so fast, Mr. President: "Here, take it" is not the way to leaveIraq, no matter what your advisers may be telling you.

Remember that these are the same people who got you into this mess for all the wrong reasons in the first place.

Back on 9/12, when Rumsfeld raised the idea that you "could take advantage of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Saddam immediately,"[1] you should have told him to go write a memo.

Three days later, when your advisors (Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al.) realized that "Another risk they faced was getting bogged down in Afghanistan"[2] and " Rice asked whether they could envision a successful campaign beyond Afghanistan, which put Iraq back on the table,"[2] you should have listened to Cheney and Powell, and sent the rest of them back to their caves. [Quotes from Bob Woodward's "Bush At War", pp. 49 (1) and 82-3 (2).]

In an e-mail to a friend last February, I said:

It's not a West Texas bar game that [you] can turn off. It's not going to be: "Attack, get Saddam, clean things up, then leave with no further consequences and everyone living happily ever after."

If Dec. 7th 1941 was "a day of infamy that will live forever" to millions of North Americans, what do you think [your] attack on Islam (their perception) is going to be to billions of Muslims? Bombing an Islamic country isn't going to make them love us, and will inflame even more of them to more terrorism. Look at Kuwait, where the US did save their bacon, but now is the site of regular attacks on Americans by fanatics.

I wasn't alone in thinking a unilateral invasion of Iraq was a really stupid, dangerous idea, of course, but you didn't listen to any of us.

And you know what happened.

Afghanistan is a disaster.

Running out and leaving just enough troops to protect Kabul was obviously not the way to wage the war on terror. Afghanistan has become the largest supplier of opium in the world (75% of the entire world supply), and both the Taliban and Al Qaeda are reorganizing since there's nobody there to stop them.

Iraq, you know about. The day after the sailors put up the "Mission Accomplished" banner, Richard Perle gushed:

From start to finish, President Bush has led the United States and its coalition partners to the most important military victory since World War II ... It ended without the Arab world rising up against us, as the war's critics feared, without the quagmire they predicted, without the heavy losses in house-to-house fighting they warned us to expect. [" Relax, Celebrate Victory," By Richard Perle]

Obviously a premature celebration and time has tragically proven him very, very wrong.

But you can't just leave.

That didn'twork in Afghanistan, and it won't work in Iraq.