ANOTHER FORMER OFFICER GETS IT

(Via Mahablog)

'Your Iraq plan?' is a pointless question
Candidates should acknowledge that Bush's war is a failure and look beyond Iraq.
By Andrew J. Bacevich
April 9, 2007
LA Times

ANDREW J. BACEVICH is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the author of "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War."

The truth is that next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there. Iraqis will decide their own fate. We are spectators, witnesses, bystanders caught in a conflagration that we ourselves, in an act of monumental folly, touched off.

Baghdad has become a cul-de-sac. Having plunged into a war he cannot win, Bush will not relent. Iraq consumes his presidency because the president wills that it should. He has become Captain Ahab: His identification with his war is absolute.

Now there is only Iraq and the effort to ensure that today's news out of Baghdad isn't any worse than yesterday's.

Our political attention, then, needs to turn to whether the president's would-be successors can do what Bush cannot: acknowledge our failure in Iraq and look beyond it.