Leave Iraq immediately, and a while ago if possible.

"Foreign observers" are necessary for elections now? If so, American elections don't count either, last I checked we don't use "foreign observers" at our poll booths. Neither do most other countries with elections. And people dying the next day doesn't mean much unless they died BECAUSE they voted. "Millions of Iraqis" CHOSE not to vote. Many more millions of Americans choose not to vote, yet you seem to consider America a democracy. Can't have your cake and eat it too. Violence goes on all the time in all sorts of countries. Are France's elections invalid whenever they have a riot? What about the elections that resulted in electing those who eliminated segregation? If you dismiss all elections that occur in a violent environment or appeal, the logical consequence of your "People must have jobs, peace in order for them to be thinking about elections" is that America should reinstate segregation and the unemployed have no voting rights. How can Iraq not be considered "power of the people by the people for the people?" The people are committing violence, they get a violent country in return. They are voting with their guns and getting precisely what they ask for, except America leaving (which yes, polls indicate, they are asking for). The only thing in Iraq not under control of the Iraqi people is US troops. The logical consequence if you demand democracy is to leave. I did not say "you can attack just because you want." You can attack because the party you are attacking attacked you or someone else. As I mentioned earlier, your news from Afghanistan seems to be lacking. Elections have been charged with fraud, human rights abuses by taliban resurgence and warlords are rampant. You don't think Saddam was an enemy to the Iraqi people? Why did the Iraqi people pull down his statue once he was out of power then? Why did they execute him when they had the oppurtunity? I think sending thousands of your own people to the gas chamber makes you an enemy to them. Supporting him in the Iran-Iraq war was similar to supporting the Soviets against Hitler- the leaders were under the impression they were picking the lesser of two evils. I don't know whether they were right in either instance, but it is not grounds to continue the alliance when the situation which necessitates it is removed. Iraq was not fundamentally a "preemptive attack," it was, again, defense of a third party. Besides, there is essentially no such thing as international law, as the UN has no law enforcement agency. What exactly did we "promise" to the Iraqi people? I do know that unless Bush is more insane than we thought, whatever promise there was was set on the condition that those people not fight us ( a condition not met) and on the condition that the Iraqi government get on schedule to start taking care of itself (a condition not met). Saying you "want" to do something is not a promise. Boycotting the election was not a result of the violence (and 25 people dying does not explain millions not voting). The Sunnis gave explicitly their reasons for boycotting the election- They were not the majority, therefore they did not want democracy. There might be security in the US (in some places) but there certainly isn't enough information, at least not in a format most potential voters understand. We do NOT have more peace today in Iraq than we did earlier in the war. The Iraqi army isn't doing that well, although I don't blame the training methods for that, I blame the difficulty in enforcing the enlistment commitment (they keep training people who don't stick around). Simply because someone is not my enemy (and some of the Iraqis, keep in mind, are, because they are killing US soldiers, and some of them side with Hussein) is not a reason I should help them. The ONLY reason the US can have for helping Iraq is if Iraq helps us in return. Freedom of speech is not based on democracy (after all recent polls indicate the majority doesn't really support it). You can have a dictatorship with freedom of speech, and the Greece had a democracy without freedom of speech. Besides, the Patriot act, if you check it, means we really don't have free speech. "Human rights" depending on what you mean, are also not fully enforced in the US- the rights to life, liberty, and property are all unduly abridged. None of which, by the way, is based in democracy- the ideas were invented in a monarchy. The constitution has absolutely nothing to do with gay marriage (it says nothing about marriage at all), and as you put it earlier, elections are not proof of democracy. Iran has elections too, but it is not a democracy, it is an ecclesiocracy. Withdrawing now does not mean withdrawing without accomplishing anything. We removed Saddam and co, that is an accomplishment. We removed basically all possibility of Iraqi power projection (i.e. the capability of Iraq operating militarily anywhere outside of Iraq. That is an accomplishment. You can talk about "sanctions" in Burma and "asking" Musharraf to restore the Constitution all you want, but what has it accomplished? Both Burma and Musharraf are doing precisely as they please at the moment, and will continue to do so unless we invade. Would you like to invade? I wouldn't, burma and pakistan won't attack us, and the people there don't seem to have the resolve to pitch in with any sort of revolt, so it would be too expensive. Iraq was better under Saddam- for who? The Sunnis maybe. Not the Shiites, not the Kurds, both of which Saddam wanted to slaughter, the second of which he was doing a rather good job of. Just because the military was continually sent after Saddam's elimination does not prove it should have been. It simply demonstrates Bush had the wrong priorities. We do NOT have everything you described in Afghanistan, except again in the capital. The rest of the country is still not safe to go out at night, people are still executed in public I'm sure (not that that's necessarily a problem, as long as it is a criminal you are executing :D), girls still can't go to school (schools for males exist now and did under the Taliban). The main accomplishment in Afghanistan was to lower Al Qaeda funding from that source a bit and drive Osama out of it.