Now that some conservatives/neocons are giving up on the Iraq-as-democracy line, they are proposing a "third way" solution - pull our troops back to the desert in Western Iraq, let the Iraqis kill themselves and if a specific terrorist threat arises, attack only then. Daniel Pipes and Peter Bergen (in the NY Times) have proposed this as the way forward.

At first, this sounded reasonable to me and certainly more so than Rep. Murhta's idiotic proposal to move our troops to Okinawa which is actually as far or further from Iraq than is the United States (aside from the fact that we'd need to fly over China and Iran to get there.

However, I'm afraid that all this would do is set up Israel version 2.0 in the Middle East - a Western outpost set up surrounded by hostiles who will just start lobbing missiles into the "American sector" every once in awhile drawing us out and back into the larger conflict.