Dirty War

Feel free to ignore the details--such as they are--of yesterday's "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" released by the White House. The strategy merely spends a great deal of time emphasizing the enduring will of the United States to "win," before saying that "Iraqis will ultimately be the ones to eliminate their security threats over the long term." In other words, while limited draw-downs of U.S. forces may be the only troop reductions on Bush's watch, his strategy concedes that when the last U.S. soldier ultimately lowers the last American flag, the insurgency will in some measure continue. I can't really argue with that recognition, given that I've written as much. But sadly, even accepting the strategy's linchpin--the successful preparation of Iraqi forces to assume security "responsibilities," which are never defined--we're unlikely to get to even the reduced rate of insurgency the strategy predicts before ultimate withdrawal. As the Army War College's Conrad Crane and W. Andrew Terrill write in a new report, "It is no longer clear that the United States will be able to create [Iraqi] military and police forces that can secure the entire country no matter how long U.S. forces remain." Given the unsustainable strains on the U.S. military--to say nothing of the U.S. Treasury--created by the war, that's a diplomatic way of saying the war is unwinnable....