Not necessarily. What the majority of the population wants isn’t always the best course for the nation. If the government wanted us to go, then I would say “pull out”. But the government has a better handle on the defense needs of Iraq. Which is not to say our presence and our actions aren’t major irritants - they are. But the government knows we are needed.
I think that there is some confusion as to who wants what. Remember, whenever there is an overwhelming occupying force, governments lose legitmacy. Even so, it is Iraq that is resisting the US in its demands concerning the conditions of an ongoing occupation agreement. The US wants open ended, that is politically unacceptable in Iraq. The US wants blanket and perpetual immunity, that is also unacceptable to Iraqi’s at large - they, understandably, see groups like Blackwater as violent thugs who abuse their position outside any rule of law.
Its not an issue I know much about. But I don’t think creating an Islamic government (and I’m not quite sure what that is) was the intention of the Bush administration.
If we look at the principle architects of the war, there is little doubt what the original objective was. They are all overwhelmingly charter members of the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, and have been writing about the need for a permanent US force in an oil rich part of the Middle East for more than a decade. On multiple occassions the group suggested that Iraq, with the no fly zones and Saddam, offered a good “excuse” to make the dream so.
The original plan was to install a friendly puppet government (remember Chalabi, the wanted felon who fed us all that false intelligence for buckets of money?). This may never have been possible, but it became utterly impossible when the administration spent almost two years living out a neoconservative fantasy. The country was flooded with young political hacks with no experience in actual infrastructure construction, and they wasted their time on nonesense like designing flat tax systems and building ubber-bases. Add incredibly bad ideas like dismantling the army and a “de-bathist” policy, along with spectacularly corrupt and ineffective reconstruction efforts, and it is small wonder that an insurgency took root.
Ignoring it for far too long, and fueling it with secret prisons, private thugs (like blackwater), and renditions and torture, and it is small wonder that chaos still runs rampant.
There are really only two certainties at this point: 1) Whatever happens, Iran is strengthened. Sunni dictator, Shia majority, it is inevitable, and was utterly predictable. 2) The US will remain at odds with the Church.
This second one is harder to understand but, again, virtually unavoidable. The Church, of course, strenously objected to the war. But, having engaged in ‘preventive’ war (which is not really permitted in either Church or international law), Rome and the USCCB noted we had some moral responsibilities, in particular, the plight of refugees, disproportionately Christian. But the only significant stability we have achieved has come, primarily, by essentially switching sides. Directly aiding the Sunni Awakening. We are basically arming milias and letting them ethnically cleanse (which includes persecuting Christians) and control areas. The central Iraqi government, such as it is, hates this, because it will inevitably come back to haunt them in ethnic conflict. But that government needs to be propped up by the US, so it is ineffective in changing it. On the flip side, the US cannot afford to do what is right, because we lack the capacity to instill or maintain order. So OBL sits in Pakistan making videos (and we leave him alone because we need Pakistan to stay in Iraq), Iran makes ties and provides aide to
all Shia factions (we actually are more aligned with the groups receiving the most Iranian aide, not the least), and we have to placate Sunni warlords with direct aide because they can engage in Shia cleansing, which we cannot (it is essentially curtailing, say, AQI, which was only 2% of the insurgents, but a significant source of sectarian violence by driving
all Shias from an area. Since the majority of the population is Shia, and we at least like to pretend we are interested in democracy and liberty, we have to do regional ethnic cleansing by proxy. But, since that is what we need to keep the peace, we cannot follow the Church, which is not interested in US politics or strategic political interestes, but the natural law and the inalienable rights of the human person.
Something to keep in mind is that as long as we engage in the torture of detainees (and the standard in the Catechism is international law (CCC 2313), Just War is impossible. Even George Weigel has publicly acknolwedged this. In that case, we cannot be a licit occupying force. We are, instead, an “unjust agressor”.
Similiarly, the persecution of refugees and their forced dislocation/deportation, is proibited by the Pastoral Constition of the Church. It is an inalienable right, bestowed by God (it also happens to be the foundation of JPII’s teaching on abortion). So our complicency in it again makes our occupation unjust.
There is no reason to try to pretend that a moral imperitive is what is at stake. Again, look at the conflict over an agreement. What are the sticking points? The current administration wants to stay forever and operate outside any rule of Iraqi law. This is a bad idea about promoting US strategic interest militarily, combined with domestic politics. Pretending it is a moral issue just prevents us from reasonably assessing the effectivness of the policies for what they are.
You asked me to imagine a scenario where foreign troops were based on our soil. My response was that I can’t imagine that scenario. If our military were truly so weak that Canada posed an imminent threat to us, then I suppose it would make sense to have foreign troops to protect us. But really, the scenario is very far-fetched.