The mistakes that were made early on to invade and then to occupy instead of turning the country over early on to the Iraqis are what cost us the war. We are over there stuck in a quagmire that is twice as bad as Vietnam. Not because of what Casey did but because Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz were out of their league when they planned this in the first place. Everyone says we should forget the past and concentrate on the present, but its hard to do when the past created the intransigent problems we are facing in the present.

Casey is this war’s Westmoreland. He’s a terrible officer, so naturally he was promoted to CSA after doing such a good job in Iraq.

We finally have some good leadership running the war at the operational level, but it’s too little, too late.

How has “we’ll stand down as they stand up”, Operation Together Forward and Operation Sinbad worked so far?

Actually, those operations were part of the strategy under Casey – a strategy that everyone agrees failed miserably.

Basically the idea of the surge was to turf this mess to the next administration- and preserve the idea that victory was still possible. Gen Hayden had advised the ISG in ’05 that there was almost no chance that the Iraqi government would be able to govern the country. What little progress has been reported towards meeting the benchmarks was mostly WH spin.

The decision on the future of US involvement is ultimately political, not military. Military leaders will, and should, inform the political debate with their expertise, but they cannot assume the war will end in 2008, 2009 or whenever and must be prepared to continue on in Iraq.

The people want peace, they want to have electricity, to not feel that they might be saying goodbye for the last time every time their child goes to school. But the politicians do not neccesarily care about these things. Instability and even war serves some people just fine. For starters war helps to cover up the incapacity to put your house in order in terms of roads, healthcare, schools etc. since everything can be blamed on the war. A terrified populace will continue to vote for their tribal peers, frightened that if “the others” win, they will be next on the hit list. These powerful men don’t give a damn about “securing the peace”, war works just fine for most of them.