Only Lunatics Keep Fighting an Unwinnable War

Ted Rall - To anyone possessing a milligram of common sense, it has been obvious from the start -- before the start -- that invading Iraq would be disastrous.

Any American capable of reading between the lines sensed trouble when the Bush Administration's giddy predictions of flower-throwing Iraqis never materialized to greet our advancing columns. Even the silliest Pollyanna must have shuddered a little when it came to light that the war's singular Kodak moment, the toppling of Saddam's statue in Fardus Square, turned out to have been just as phony as the "evidence" recited at Colin Powell's UN speech.

"We can't leave," Newsweek quotes an officer with a major security firm in Iraq (hmm). "If it takes a million f---ing American lives, we have to stay."

The hell we do. Sooner or later, one way or another, we're leaving--as defeated and bankrupt and demoralized as we were when we fled Saigon. The only question now is: how many more people are we going to kill before we cut and run?