Time for Bush to accept Iraq failure

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http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/sunnews/news/opinion/16094769.htm

Good lord, if even Henry Kissinger now says that military victory in Iraq is impossible, pretty soon George W. Bush really will be left with just Laura and Barney on his side. The Decider Agonistes must be feeling betrayed and abused.

Kissinger? The oracle who has been dropping by the White House regularly to whisper sweet nothings into the presidential ear, urging him to hang tough? The sage who wrote in August 2005 that "victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy" is now listing Bush's conditions for withdrawal - a stable government, ruling all of Iraq, with the ability to control the violence - and pronouncing them unattainable.

Meanwhile, the neocon architects of the war are making a spectacle of themselves in their undignified flight from the sinking ship. Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Rubin - they all take pretty much the same line, which is that the invasion was a great and noble idea but the White House and the Pentagon bungled it.

Defections, recriminations and finger-pointing among the people who got us into this mess provide an amusing sideshow, but the main event is the mandate that midterm voters imposed this month: Find a way out.

Sen. John McCain has planted his flag at one extreme of the debate, making the counterintuitive argument that the way to get out of Iraq is to send in a lot more U.S. troops who would stabilize the country as a necessary prelude to withdrawal. By "counterintuitive," I mean "divorced from reality as we know it." For one thing, the troops McCain wants to send do not exist - the military is stretched paper-thin as it is, and I don't think Rep. Charles Rangel's proposal to reinstate the draft is going to get very far. For another, McCain doesn't specify how all those magically conjured reinforcements are supposed to accomplish such a mission.