Your bummer for the day

From a Washington Post OpEd written by William Odem. First, I want to introduce him...

William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, was head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan. He served on the National Security Council staff under Jimmy Carter. A West Point graduate with a PhD from Columbia, Odom teaches at Yale and is a fellow of the Hudson Institute.

Another Hudsom Institute 'scholar' is Lewis Libby. I point that out so you understand that this guy Odem isn't some Brookings Institution Liberal. (not that it's a bad thing.)

So, the guy's got credibility. The headline of his piece: "Victory Is Not an Option." The opening paragraph ends with:

Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Actually, according to this analysis, there was never any realistic possibility of that outcome:

First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly "constitutional" -- meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.

And then, the part that worries me the most, the long term impact of this war on U.S. relations with the rest of the world, particularly the Arab world.

Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis' rising animosity toward the United States.

One one hand, good riddance. Who wants to have a relationship with religious zealots? Except, what are the options? We're not very good at being the cop of the world. We are losing in Iraq (population 27 million) while sabre rattling about Iran (population 66 million. Iran is also about four times the geographic size of Iraq.)

We're in a hole. We need a way out. Quickly. How? Well, some candidates have a few ideas. But we don't need to wait, we could use, oh hell, maybe diplomacy? This genie is out of the bottle and there's no turning back. But our risk only increases every day that we're engaged militarily in Iraq. The safety of our country depends on an end to our involvement in Iraq.