Operation Iraqi Freedom is not the type of folly that one can fix by staying the course. Nor can it be fixed by putting more shoulders to the wheel. Indeed, we cannot truly fix this disaster at all — not without recourse to time travel. However, we can begin to repair the damage. And it is worth remembering that the United States and its armed forces rebounded relatively quickly from the Vietnam War debacle.
Read the whole report here from the Project on Defense Alternatives. They wind up endorsing a rather ambitious effort to get the Security Council and “a consortium of Iraq’s neighbors” to try and guide the country to stability in the wake of American withdrawal rather than a simpler plan where one simply gives up on Iraq and looks to regional diplomacy as a means of containing the damage elsewhere. I’d love to debate these fine distinctions, but since the actual Bush administration plan is to escalate military involvement in Iraq and perhaps widen the war to include Iran, there hardly seems to be a point.