The Iraq War is as lost as Vietnam

Robert Dreyfuss has apt comparisons to Vietnam in his brief article.

Over the past two weeks, I've had extended conversations with former diplomats and intelligence officers about Iraq. To a man (and woman), they were pessimistic, and blackly so. Over the past 18 months, one of them told me, the intelligence community put out two National Intelligence Estimates on Iraq and an additional major supplement, all of which told the White House the truth: that the war in Iraq is not going well, and is likely to get worse. So the administration knows the truth, at least if they choose to believe their spies and analysts. (Of course, the work product of the spies and analysts may get worse if the new bosses - John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and Porter Goss, the CIA director - have their way. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, spent his days penning happy-talk propaganda about how well the war was going, which got back to Secretary of State Colin Powell last year and almost persuaded him that the war was winable.) But, just as "intelligence and facts" were being fixed around policy in 2002, it appears that in 2005, the Bush administration is once again ignoring its intelligence community and choosing to portray the war as progressing along nicely.

...Like the phalanx of American foreign policy Wise Men - the Clark Cliffords and Averill Harrimans of the 1960s - who read the riot act to LBJ after Tet, today's establishment, including the Democrats, has to demand that Bush start to reality in Iraq, and not to the fantasies that the neoconservatives sold him on in 2001.

Unfortunately, in my opinion the Dreyfus peace process solution is non-tenable. I can think of no group involved who would accept it. I also can think of no group that will even read the riot act on Bush or even imagine Bush listening to it.