All I want to know is when we will we know we have won in Iraq and can leave. Nobody - Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice or Cheney - has explained to me in clear, concise language how the American Public will be able to recognize when we have won. All we have heard for more than three years are vague, unclear, testosterone-laden platitudes that fail to address this basic question. It seems to me the question has not been answered, because we don't really have a strategy for Iraq other than to make political speeches that scare people when election-time comes. We heard "mushroom cloud", "oust Saddam", "fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here", and most recently that Iraq is some sort of small battle in the containment of Muslim fascism. It doesn't come as a surprise, but clearly this Administration does not have a clue what to do in Iraq, and by extension the war on terror.
In any project, break the problem down into manageable parts; narrow the issues. Not Mr. Bush, who, unlike the rest of mankind, has taken the opposite approach. Rather than keep it simple and just go after the guy who killed 3000 Americans, he attacked a country two countries away. It seems to me the war on terror - by the way, a war on a tactic? Kind of like a war on flanking maneuvers - was doomed the minute Mr. Bush agreed to allocate resources away from Afghanistan. I couldn't have given a rat's ass if we offended Afghanistan or Pakistan, we should have gone into the border regions with hundreds of thousands of troops and found bin Laden. Rather than think in global, intellectual nonsense, we should have narrowed the scope of the project and gotten the guy who terrorized America. Instead, we got the guy who didn't terrorize America for the reasonable cost of (1) $300-$1,000 billion, (2) 2,650 dead Americans,
(4) 20,000 wounded Americans, (5) 40,000 dead Iraqis, (6) 100,000's injured Iraqis, (7) loss of American credibility, (8) installation of a fundamentalist Iraqi regime, (9) a more powerful Iran, (10) a played out hand vis a vis Iran, and (8) an expanded war on terror. Remind me not to let Mr. Bush near my checkbook; his judgment on the cost of things isn't really very good.