ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE AGAINST THE WAR

This time it's the editor of Human Events, Jed L. Babbin. From the 4/24/08 edition of the WaPo:

Jed L. Babbin: I'm not here to defend President Bush. If you read my writings -- since about April 2002 -- you'll see that I've been highly critical of the way he's handled the war. But to call Petraeus a partisan player is simply wrong. I've met him many times and there's no politics in what he's been doing. Call the surge whatever you like, but it is a war strategy aimed to support the neocon nation-building strategy. That strategy is -- as I've written again and again -- profoundly wrong.

Nation-building is not America's mission. We are not a colonialist nation and never should be. As George Bush has defined it, our goal in the war is to create an Iraq that can defend, govern and sustain itself and be an ally in the longer war. That's profoundly wrong.

As I explain more fully in the piece we'll post below, our goals must be to end state sponsorship of terrorism and defeat the radical Islamist ideology.

Right now, because President Bush has it so terribly wrong, we're not even on a path to that result. As my old Pentagon boss used to say, "if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."

Right now, we're on a random road, not a road to victory.