We will never be in firm control if our success rests on paying off tribes to not kill us. Those tribes will begin to fight as soon as we leave.

The tribes have to be absorbed into whatever future gov't there is. As in the Kingdom and Jordan. Where the tibes have been left on their own or bought off - there is disaster waiting. Ala Paksitan and the Pastun. We have created the very thing which could keep us there. No one will have real control and then no one can leave.

We have to leave and allow the tribes to either be subsumed back into Iraqi society or to fight their civil wars. With over 100,000 of them - they cannot be ignored. They will only contract with us for 90 days at a time. Every 3 months we re-negotiate ever higher fees to pay them. They win every negotiation. We are not in control of them.

The surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

Council on Foreign Affairs -

A committee of British MPs charged with examining the security situation in Basra as British forces began to draw down concluded that warlords and criminal gangs had all but taken over the city. "Although the reduction in attacks on UK forces can only be welcome," the committee's report noted, "this alone cannot be a measure of success. The initial goal of UK forces in South Eastern Iraq was to establish the security necessary for the development of representative political institutions and for economic reconstruction. . . . This goal remains unfulfilled."

Significant Sunni segments are funded by the United States, but they are not in our control. Withdrawal from Iraq means leaving a country more divided than when we invaded -- thanks to a strategy that has systematically nourished domestic rivalries in order to maintain an illusory short-term stability.

New contracts every 3 months...with warlords. And this -

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, an estimated 4.7 million have been displaced both within and outside Iraq and for many the situation is desperate.

Syria is throwing out 1 million Iraqi refugees - now.

We've taken in around 5,800 Iraqis, this year. There are 10,000 Iraqi refugees in Turkey and 750,000 in Jordan, which is starting to really throw them out - now.

Last year we did a whopping 202.

WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it had created a task force to make sure the United States is doing "its share" to take in Iraqi refugees following criticism in Congress that it accepted only 202 last year.

We won't even take the poor bastards in. Better to pen them all up over there. Can't smell them or hear them.

It will never be under our control.

This is as good as it gets for us.

The tribes are getting restless and expensive. The Iraqi Army will never fight that civil war with them while they have us to use for shields and bait and financiers.

The refugees will take decades of financing and tending too - even in their sheep pens. More expense and smelly.

We have to get out or we'll drown in the swamp we've made.