Delusions of victory

By Michael J.W. Stickings

There was a brilliant column by Joseph Galloway in yesterday's Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Make sure to read the whole thing, but here's a taste:

The power brokers in Washington carefully arranged fig leaves and tasteful screens to cover the emperor's nakedness while he was busy pretending to listen hard to everyone with an opinion about Iraq while hearing nothing.

Sometime early in the new year, President Bush will go on national television to tell a disgruntled American public what he has decided should be done to salvage "victory" from the jaws of certain defeat in the war he started.

The word on the street, or in the Pentagon rings, is that he'll choose to beef up American forces on the ground in Iraq by 20,000 to 30,000 troops by various sleight-of-hand maneuvers -- extending the combat tours of soldiers and Marines who are nearing an end to their second or third year in hell and accelerating the shipment of others into that hell -- and send them into the bloody streets of Baghdad...

This hardly amounts to a "new way forward," unless that definition includes a new path deeper into the quicksand of a tribal and religious civil war in which whatever Bush eventually decides is already inadequate and immaterial.

And that's because the Iraq War -- Bush's war -- has already been lost.