Not surprisingly, I agree with Andrew Bacevich:

Look beyond the spin, the wishful thinking, the intellectual bullying and the myth-making. The real legacy of the surge is that it will enable Bush to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor — no doubt cause for celebration at AEI, although perhaps less so for the families of U.S. troops. Yet the stubborn insistence that the war must continue also ensures that Bush’s successor will, upon taking office, discover that the post-9/11 United States is strategically adrift. Washington no longer has a coherent approach to dealing with Islamic radicalism. Certainly, the next president will not find in Iraq a useful template to be applied in Iran or Syria or Pakistan.

According to the war’s most fervent proponents, Bush’s critics have become so “invested in defeat” that they cannot see the progress being made on the ground. Yet something similar might be said of those who remain so passionately invested in a futile war’s perpetuation. They are unable to see that, surge or no surge, the Iraq war remains an egregious strategic blunder that persistence will only compound.

The case for the surge, and the war more generally, has long been bound up in a failure to think coherently about purposes and objectives. If, instead, you throw a bunch of troops into the mix, have them do a bunch of stuff, see what happens, and then define in retrospect whatever it is they’re accomplishing as the purpose of the mission, then, sure, new tactics are working. When our old tactics were aimed at having our troops wander around the desert and kill armed Sunni Arabs, we succeeded in doing that. Switch tactics to helping to train and equip these very same people, and now we’re succeeding at doing that. But what are we trying to accompish?

I was a bit surprised to see Jonathan Zasloff recommend this pearl of wisdom from Roger Simon:

Who would you like to be in the White House if Pakistan fell to al Qaeda and the Islamists gained control of its nuclear arsenal?

Answer that question and you will know your candidate. All the rest, as they say, is commentary.

One issue here is that this is a pretty outlandish hypothetical. The odds of the Pakistani government collapsing and al-Qaeda taking over are low. But more to the point, much more than a president who’ll respond effectively when al-Qaeda seizes control of a nuclear arsenal you want a president who’ll make it unlikely that al-Qaeda seizes a nuclear arsenal. There’s an unfortunately tendency to look at crisis-response as the essence of statesmanship when in reality it’s avoiding crises that is most important. I think, for example, that George H.W. Bush did the right thing in prosecuting the first Gulf War and, indeed, that he did a good job of waging the war. But an even better president might have been able ot avoid the whole thing in the first place by dissuading Saddam from invading Kuwait.

My hope, in short, isn’t that the next president will be better than Bush at reacting than disaster strikes, but that he (or, more likely, she) will be better than Bush at forestalling disaster.