America is tired of Iraq. I think we have all come to the conclusion that, whether or not we supported the war at one point or another, it turned into a giant mess that we want out of. Stories about Iraq have been phased out of the news, because if its not good news, we don't want to hear it anymore. We have lost a lot of men, a lot of prestige, and a lot of money in this seemingly unresolvable conflict.

To make matters worse, the news that is coming in is not so good. Each week, bombs are continuing to go off. One day a bomb goes off in a mosque, 22 dead, the next a car bomb drives into a market, 38 dead, but after six years of violence and bloodshed, these stories don't seem to mean that much. Violence has become commonplace in Iraq.

While it is easy to delude ourselves into thinking that Iraq is an inherently hopeless place and violence is inevitable, the truth was that this violence was brought on, directly or indirectly, by America. Saddam Hussein was a tightly screwed lid on the country; he was a harsh oppressor, but there was predictability. Citizens knew that if they did one thing, there would be a reaction, however unjust it may be.

When the United States invaded, we basically shook the bottle up and popped the lid off, predictably creating a giant mess. With no police, violence ran rampant. Internal tensions that were boiling below the surface under Saddam exploded in hatred and violence. Whereas Saddam oppressed Shiites, now they saw it as their turn for revenge. These things were very difficult for the American military to understand because it is not their job to learn complexities of foreign societies; their job is to shoot people, and they are really good at it.

Despite limited progress, the underlying issues that we unleashed have not been resolved. The Prime Minister is a Shiite who only seems interested in continuing to punish Sunnis. Sunni groups, who were employed skillfully and effectively by the American military, called the "Sunni Awakening," are now armed to the teeth with our weapons. Terrorist groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq only want to play these sides against each other to create more chaos. They will blow up a Sunni mosque just to provoke a Shiite reaction, whether or not they have ethnic preferences.

Yet the United States wants out, and that is what is happening. On this pace, the Iraq war will be considered a blunder not only for the hasty entrance, but the hasty, indifferent exit. We are content to look at the Iraqi government on paper, which doesn't seem so bad, even though we know that the country is deteriorating. We are looking at this through our short-term interests, not realizing that if Iraq becomes an all-out war zone, our military is going to be back over there within 10 years.

It's our mess, but we don't want to clean it up.