Well, duh!

My reaction to the news that the United States wants to stay in Iraq forever is "well, duh!"
Of course that's what they intend to do.
The Bush administration has the maturity level of a bunch of testosterone-addled, wargame-playing teenagers. These guys actually believe that America has to have a visible, swaggering , threatening presence before it can influence the Middle East.
And they're a backward-looking bunch -- they never really got over feeling emasculated by Bush Daddy's decision not to invade Iraq in 1990, by Jimmy Carter's Iranian hostage crisis, by Richard Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam.
So they think that staying in Iraq will keep America sitting in the catbird seat this time, able to run the whole Middle East. That's why they started the war in the first place.
And when Barak Obama is elected president the pressure on him to keep Americans in Iraq will be intense and unrelenting.
Iraq is now "strategic", ya see.