If it is meaningless to say most people want peace, it’s equally meaningless to say a violent minority can take over a country. Yeah, so? Sometimes those violent minorities succeed, sometimes they don’t (the Shining Path, the Huks, the FMLN, the communists in Greece and Malaysia, and so on–here’s an excellent history of the successes and failures of insurgencies.) We don’t know whether Iraq’s violent minority is going to succeed or not, but we do know leaving now would give it a big boost. Furthermore, I believe we will all know when we are witnessing a general collapse in Iraq (so we won’t have to rely on Derb’s gut to figure it out) and/or a definitive loss of will on the part of the American public, either of which would mean losing the war. We’re not there (yet?), and I hope we never will be.