Our military presence in Iraq is a major problem – period. People try to argue the “stay the course” line over and over again, but look at these stories from today alone:

Four more U.S. soldiers have been charged with rape and murder and a fifth with dereliction of duty in the alleged rape-slaying of a young Iraqi woman and the killings of her relatives in Mahmoudiya, the military said Sunday.

The five were accused Saturday following an investigation into allegations that American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division raped the teenager and killed her and three relatives at her home south of Baghdad.

And then this one from today’s New York Times:

No American serviceman has been executed since 1961. But in the past month, new cases in Iraq have led to charges against 12 American servicemen who may face the death penalty in connection with the killing of Iraqi civilians.

Military officials caution against seeing the cases as part of any broader pattern, noting that the incidents in question are isolated and rare. But the new charges represent an extraordinary flurry in a conflict that has had relatively few serious criminal cases so far.

As investigators complete their work, military officials say, the total of American servicemen charged with capital crimes in the new cases could grow substantially, perhaps exceeding the total of at least 16 other marines and soldiers charged with murdering Iraqis throughout the first three years of the war.

There are numerous reasons for this sudden rash of violence in Iraq, but the outcome will be the same. We have soldiers who have been fighting over there for 3+ years now. Some of these soldiers have tried to leave, but they cannot because of “stop loss”. Living in this kind of turmoil and violent bloodshed day in and day out for that extended amount of time leads to stress. That stress then leads to acts like this. We can’t blame just the soldiers for what has happened, we also need to blame the leaders (and that includes Rumsfeld and Bush).

No matter what, the number of attacks against our soldiers will start to increase. We will now be looked at as the enemy. We can sit here and say “we are brining them to justice and these are isolated incidents”, but to people who have had to tolerate an occupying force for this long, they don’t feel the same way. These actions act as a perfect recruiting tool for the insurgency and it will be exploited.

To all the people who said Murtha was wrong – well you are wrong. Murtha was right. He told us in November what would happen and we are now seeing the beginning of it. We are at a point where we must pull out of Iraq and pull out now.