Iraq War: More on a disaster

Sidney Blumenthal is also writing about the sorry state of things in the Iraq War: The "war is lost" Salon.com 09/16/04.  A sample:

Retired Gen. William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse -- he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He added: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving [Osama] bin Laden's ends."

Retired Gen. Joseph Hoare, the former Marine commandant and head of the U.S. Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all," said Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College. "The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after World War II in Germany and Japan."  (my emphasis)

Of course, the True Believers who still think WMDs will turn up once the leprechauns' pixie dust dissipates will say that Blumenthal and the people he quotes are "defeatists," "stabbing our soldiers in the back," blah, blah.  They will say that men like Gen. Odom, Gen. Hoare and Jeffrey Record hate America.

But the people saying that were also the ones cheering loudest to get into this disaster.  So their judgment in such matter is not to be accepted unequivocally by those who don't like seeing our country plunged into disasters.

Blumenthal also quotes Professor W. Andrew Terrill of the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, giving an idea of what level resonable expectation of the least bad American exit, peace with honor, we might say, has come to be:  "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."  Gen. Odom says, "The two parties whose interests have been advanced [by the Iraq War] have been the Iranians and al-Qaida."