Iraq War: This exit strategy doesn't sound pretty, but it may be right

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

Bob Dreyfuss has some thoughtful - and actually meaningful - comparisons of the Iraq War to the Vietnam War: The Vietnam Solution TomPaine.com 06/28/05.  Here is his take on what he thinks would be the most feasible exit strategy for the US:

Once again, it is obvious to all - again, including our intelligence agencies - that the war in Iraq is lost. Once again, like the [1968] Tet Offensive [in Vietnam], the recent wave of bloody assaults across Iraq has made it clear that the resistance, far from being in its "last throes," is not being defeated. Once again, a Nixon-like American administration is refusing to sue for peace. Though Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has admitted that U.S. authorities in Iraq have been conducting an on-again, off-again dialogue with some elements of the insurgency, it is not nearly enough. The United States is talking, but not negotiating—instead, it is trying to find a few disparate elements of the resistance in order to get them to support the U.S.-installed Iraqi interim government. Such take-it-or-leave-it dialogues are doomed to failure, since all they can produce are a few more Sunni quislings who will immediately become targets of the insurgency themselves. For the most part, the United States continues to insist that all potential olive branches from the resistance be delivered to the offices of the interim (and utterly illegitimate) ersatz government in the modern-day Saigon that is Baghdad.

It is perfectly clear what the United States has to do. It must abandon its deformed offspring in Baghdad, the hapless regime of Shiite fanatics and Kurdish warlords, and pray that it can establish direct talks with the people it is fighting.

There is no other exit strategy.

But can Karl Rove package it as a macho strategy for Radical Republicans?

I should add that I'm not quite as negative on the Iraqi government as Dreyfuss - although he is a well-informed reporter on the Middle East, so I do take his analyses seriously.

But that the Iraqi government may have more legitimacy than he gives it credit for having isn't necessarily good news for the US.  This is Shia-dominated government, inclined to be very friendly to Iran.  Ayatollah Sistani insisted on having elections in more-or-less the way they were held; the Bush administration effectively caved in to his preferences.  While the regime is militarily dependent on the US at the moment, it can't be seen as simply a puppet government.

Whatever their intentions, the Bush team has succeeded in installing a pro-Iranian Shia regime in Iraq.

Dreyfuss also has more faith in the Bush administration than I do in one way, at least.  He thinks that by 2007, the approaching elections will persuade them to embrace a disengagement strategy of some kind.  I don't expect to see them do that at all.  It will be left to the next president.  I hope I'm wrong.  The Iraq War is doing major damage to US interests.

But exiting may also damage American interests badly, as well.  That's part of the meaning of "quagmire."  Dreyfuss would prefer some kind of negotiated withdrawal to setting a date-certain for withdrawal.  "Still," he writes, "the Iraqi resistance knows (as does the U.S. intelligence community) that eventually Washington is going to have to make a deal, or just get out."