bgates is certainly very knowledgeable and well-informed. Her(?) defense of GWB and the Iraq War is like the performance of a good attorney defending her powerful (possibly guilty) client. Think Kenneth Lay. The court of public opinion has already spoken but the trial is still going on and the jury won’t deliberate for a while.
Since we’re “in court,” let’s define what “win” means. Based on the expectations created by the Bush Administration, we can probably agree that a win in Iraq means that 1) Iraq retains its territorial pre-war integrity/unity, 2) Iraq develops a multi-party democratic government, 3) the sectarian violence stops, 4) Iraq develops a “prosperous” economy where the per-capita GDP is at least equal to that of Iran, 5) American troops are reduced to less than 10,000.
I can accept that we shouldn’t say that we lost the Iraq War since it’s still going on. However, we are certainly not yet winning. The war itself is not over so it can’t be called a failure. But, so far, the implementation of the war has been a failure.
Can the Administration rescue the war and turn it into a win by their own definition? I doubt it. They are going to redefine what win means and reset the public’s expectations. That’s probably what Republican strategists are working on right now.
The real estate bubble will be still be deflating a few years from now. I think that Iraq will be over before the real estate bottom. So, in a few years, Piggington will still be around and we’ll be here to start a thread on whether we won or lost.
In the mean time, we can continue to debate how the war is being fought. The tactics for winning the war have so far turned disastrous. Bush has two more years to see his strategy to fruition. The problem is that his strategy is democracy, unity, prosperity, they-stand-up-we-stand-down rhetoric. What kind of strategy is that? How can the strategy be the same as “winning” itself?
