Failure is an Option - Iraqi War lost - how to recover

Whiskey Bar has an overview of the Iraq mess now.

...The most important questions that need to be asked about the war on terrorism (and this was true even before 9/11) are on the grand strategic level. Grand strategy has been defined as the process by which nations articulate and pursue their core interests. Col. John Boyd, one of the great military thinker of the post World War II era, argued that grand strategy should focus on six key goals:

* Ensuring the nation's fitness, as an organic whole, to shape and cope with an ever-changing environment.

* Strengthening national resolve and increasing internal political solidarity.

* Weakening the resolve of the nation's adversaries and reducing their internal cohesion.

* Reinforcing the commitments of our allies to our cause and making them empathetic to our success.

* Attracting the uncommitted to our cause.

* Ending conflicts on terms that do not sow the seeds for future conflicts.

These, of course, are precisely the areas where the Cheney administration's failures have been most abject.