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The value of human lives is in the balance of the next American Presidential election. Barack Obama has said his foreign policy will bring our troops home from Iraq. John McCain supports an enhanced surge' strategy that requires more personnel stationed and operating in hostile city environments. The counterinsurgency strategy supported by McCain has reduced ground force and civilian casualties by 70 percent.

But this reduction includes the lives of Iraqi citizens. If the U.S. forces were to leave Iraq, there would be zero American military casualties. If Iraqi lives have no value, Obama may have the best foreign policy that includes timetables dictating the removal of our forces from the area.
Since the Iraqis' are still unable to police themselves, many more Iraqi lives will be lost as Syrian and Iranian insurgents pour across the borders to ferment unrest and attempt to force the inhabitants into various secular states lead by leaders similar to Al-Sadr. The peace, now growing across Iraq would plummet into secular wars as militias battle militias, each faction supporting a powerful cleric's ideals and willing to die in order to force those principles upon others.
Indeed, the Iraqi militias currently trained by American forces are supplied by the powerful sheiks of the local areas of operation. While it is proposed that, many of these leaders have stronger ties to Tehran policies than to U.S. policies it is still the goal of our forces to have these factions work together in a non-violent manner. Our military presence is necessary to maintain the order and peaceful dialogue needed to weld the factions together, regardless of the kind of government they choose. Without our presence, the local militias would erupt into a faction-based war similar to what occurred in Lebanon in the 1980s. CNN's Michael Ware described the future of Iraq without US peacekeeping forces to be like a "Lebanon on steroids".
The lives of our forces, spent in a heartrending war that removed a tyrant and attempted to establish peace amongst a divergent and flammable population would also have little value, as many tyrants would fight for supremacy, fostering a new cycle of death and destruction upon the Iraq populace. In retrospect, the loss of American lives prior to our premature departure would have little value, as they would have died for nothing but a lesson in American politics.
Yet many polls decry the presence of Americans in Iraq while others demonstrate the popularity of

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