Let’s get serious.  Bush screwed up by getting us into Iraq in the first place, and screwed it up once we were there.  He had no plan yada yada yada.

But let’s put down the anti-Bush signs and flags and ribbons and ask some simple questions with respect to Iraq:  NOW what?  How do we “win”?

I’m struggling with this, and I found this post by Billmon to be very persuasive.  He starts out by suggesting—and this is hard to swallow—that we may have already lost.

The silver lining, if one can be had, is that Iraq doesn’t HAVE to be the central front on the war on terrorism.  In fact, it clearly wasn’t before we got there.  So the grand strategy is to find a way to get out of Iraq in such a way where we can save face, and turn our attention to the global war on terrorism.  But how do we actually do that?  Just pack up and leave en masse?

I won’t detail the entire Billmon post.  As the saying goes, read the whole thing.  And pay close attention to this paper by Dan Byman, which discusses “Five Bad Options For Iraq”.