Sydney Blumenthal on Salon: "The War Is Lost"

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

"A man hoists a flag of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on a burning U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicle in Baghdad, Iraq, on Sunday, Sept. 12."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/09/16/iraq_war/index.html

Sept. 16, 2004 | "Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how we are "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.

But according to the U.S. military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired Gen. William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse -- he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He added: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Osama bin Laden's ends."

Retired Gen. Joseph Hoar, the former Marine commandant and head of the U.S. Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all," said Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College. "The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after World War II in Germany and Japan."

[izzie]

1. Could it be Bush wants Iraq to be one big mess ?

He keeps saying all in well and maybe he thinks this is how it should be.He is so odd about things. This running around dressed up in uniforms for one thing, and he used to do that when he was part owner of the ball team.