The principal tenant of the “revisionist” group of the pro-war camp is that a massive occupation force and reconstruction effort would have pre-empted the insurgency.  However, there was no draft to create such a force and the analogies to 1945 efforts are invalid.  Unlike Germany or Japan, Iraq’s males were not decimated by war, and Iraq did not face Soviet occupation as its primary alternative.  Islam and memory of the Crusades encompass the whole region and nurture a resentment of Infidel occupation.  US pursuit of oil and preference to Israel are other sources of suspicion.  Finally, empowerment of the Shia majority would incite intractable Sunni opposition, no matter what.  No combination of gimmicks or spin would ever change this.

The current “consensus” on how to get out of Iraq is even more flawed.  Day after day we are fed spin about how the Iraqi security forces are “standing up.”  Nice if this were true, but the daily casualty counts say otherwise, and too many of the “effective” Iraqi units are composed of one sect or group policing another.  Rather than mitigating the risk of a civil war, we are only fortifying the factions that will make that war more bloody.

We will go on quibbling and grasping straws until 2009.  Then there will be new retrospective WP and NYT series about “what went wrong” or “how it should have been done.”

The only truly clever strategic measure will be for redeploy US forces and leave Baghdad manned with a “stay the course” brigade of the original and current apologists for the boondoggle.  Let’s see how many of the pundits volunteer.

Wow! Informative piece.  Not much but dread has come from this conflict.  Hubris comes easy for those who exercise vast imperial power.

Within the Post article rests the best way to support our troops - redeploy them out of needless harm’s way and educate them so our future conflicts are engaged with a bit more direction and insight. 

That being said, the real way to support our troops is by employing diplomacy and positive economic incentives to win the hearts and minds of all national citizens in this our world of global consequence.

We are not doing a good job of engaging the world of Islam, yet within the fundamental tenets of our heritage rests the right to worship.  Understand the people, and we can move to a better way of peacefully co-existing. 

Muslims must determine which believers are denigrating such a rich cultural identity by their acts of mortal aggression, and those who truly believe the teachings of their holy literature.

We must realize this current conflict initiated by our questionably elected Commander-in-Chief has wrought numerous calamities now seemingly out of the control of those who started it in the first place. Are we as a people (liberty minded, capital driven, community given as we are)really allowing this fiasco to continue unabated? Each of us needs to initiate the drive to hold those who brought us this mess accountable for their folly.  Anything less, we’re not doing our job as small “d” democrats.  I say let’s move away from elected representatives who would spill innocent life to further their vested interests.

Vote the Rascals out in “06 and ‘08! -Kevo

both the nyt & the wp wanted us to go into iraq—now they’re both doing retroactive window-dressing in order to blame the mess on faulty execution, which is their way of shirking responsibility for the killing or maiming of hundreds of thousands of iraqis