Changing the course of the war in Iraq

(photo by bigfoto.com) Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "You break it, you own it." We really do not know whether Iraq is broken or not.
But we should know one thing. It is not possible to "make war on terror." It does not work that way. The U.S. can only fight terrorists where we find them. More accurately, these Islamist extremists, radical jihadis, or whatever, were almost everywhere but in Iraq. It never made sense to arbitrarily invade Iraq for the reasons given. There was no connection between the World Trade Tower attacks on 9/11/01 and Iraq. It has been a distraction from the subsequent real threats ever since.
The effect of the invasion and occupation has been to increase the number of terrorists wanting to kill Americans, not to decrease them. And now they have the perfect urban training ground for beginner jihadis, the cities of Iraq. They can "make their bones there," and move on to Jordan or any other neighboring Middle Eastern country.
The time has come for making a sensible plan for a timely, not precipitous, withdrawal from Iraq. The continued presence of coalition forces feels like an occupation to many Iraqis. Those Iraqis who like and respect us, but who think we should leave, hear no commitment from us that there will not be permanent U.S. bases there. Our forces are stretched too thin and redeployed too often to remain at a high level of effectiveness. The Iraqi defense forces do not have enough incentive to improve when we prop them up indefinitely.
More and more leaders are saying that we are in a "quagmire." More and more will admit they wished they had not voted to give the president permission to make war there, that they made a mistake.
We as a nation must ascertain the actual motivation for the war in Iraq. We have a right to know that before we go any further with permissions. My own suspicion is that the neocon goal is to establish a permanent jumping off point in Iraq. Their ideas are to 1) change the countries of Middle East, one by one, into western style democracies, and 2) safeguard a ready supply of oil for the U.S. Our current president's motivation, in my opinion, was to finish what his father started in the early 1990's, and to finally go into a battle, since he had avoided fighting in Vietnam.