With Rick Moran, but I must agree with most of what he writes in this post (Please read it all):

I don’t know if there is a way to “victory” in Iraq. Clearly the rest of the world has already made up its mind (not to mention the American media) that we have lost so that no matter what we do in Iraq, how we leave it, what we accomplish from here on out, the onus of defeat will accompany our withdrawal.

Is the ISG simply acknowledging this fact? Or are they encouraging it?

Both, probably. But in the end, it comes down to doing the best we can to bring some kind of definitive denouement to our Iraqi adventure. And it appears that at least some Democrats – whether chastened by victory or freed from having to engage in partisan sniping to differentiate themselves from Republicans – are realizing that Iraq is not Viet Nam and that simply walking away now would be catastrophic:

Collin Powell once said that if we invaded Iraq, "we own it."

My position on the war in Iraq has been consistent from day one, I was against the war, and always will feel that we made a big mistake by invading Iraq. I felt that our focus should have been on capturing Ossama Bin Laden. Instead we focused on Bush's pet hard-on with Saddam Hussien. Well, Saddam is facing death, his country is in a ruinous civil war, and we have accomplished little there except to defeat a half assed army and create chaos.

I have said, and will say again. We can NOT pull out of Iraq and leave it in a state of civil war. Not only is that immoral, but impractical. By doing so, we have simply replaced Afghanistan as a Jihadi training ground, with Iraq. The Iraq Study group has just released its report. I have not yet read it, but the excerpts I have seen are not pleasant. It seems that the Secretary of Defense's analysis of the war being
"lost," is shared by the Iraq Study Group.

I am not a military strategist. And I don't have any solutions. I only know that pulling out of Iraq and leaving it Balkanized is NOT the solution. It is absolutely criminal what the Bush administration did in Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld's memo on changing the strategy in Iraq, is a footnote on a shame filled chapter of American History. A chapter where an Administration was allowed to run amok, while supporters and conservative bloggers cheered on the dissaster with idiotic commentary about new schools and hospitals opening, while terror and chaos spiraled out of control.

There may have been a time when we could have won this war. There may have been a time when we could have helped the Iraqi people to create a new democracy in the Middle East. That time may be passed, but one thing is for certain... Whether our high goals of a beautiful new Democracy in the Middle East are met or not, we CAN not leave chaos... Too much blood has been spilled.

Do we really want the world to remember Iraq by images of torture (Not the Saddam kind, but our own), of Iraqis, and a daily flood of casualty figures from the Civil War we left behind?

How many innocent deaths will there have to be, before conservative commentators can stop using Saddam's carnage, to justify that which WE created?

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Tracked on December 6, 2006 04:09 PM