Mr. “Faster please” suddenly sees things my way:
The basic sermon remains as true as ever: We are playing a sucker’s game in Iraq, because we are fighting in a single country even though we are engaged in a regional war. This guarantees we cannot win the broader war. Administration officials have struggled mightily to avoid this hard truth, because they want to be able to declare “victory” in Iraq as soon as possible, and then get out.
This is the essence of why our strategery in Iraq is so wildly off the mark. As I wrote over a year ago, attempting to win a “war on Islam terror” by occupying Iraq is like expecting to defeat the Third Reich by occupying Alsace. It’s NEVER going to work.
This leads the defenders of the administration to argue that the strategery is justified and secretly brilliant because the president has been lying to the American people all along and his real goal is the conquest of the entire Middle East. I wonder how they’ll argue that Congress actually approved the declaration of that war? Thus is the president damned by his own defense.
Note – My beginning conclusion about the justification for the war was incorrect in the column of April 2004 mentioned above. The invasion was not justified on that basis, as I subsequently learned that there was no ceasefire agreement between the USA and Iraq, only a peace agreement between Iraq and the UN.