The war ended in 2003. Everything that occurred after that was just the US ineffectively meddling in arab politics.

That's why there's such a problem composing the coherent strategy that would lead to effective action by the Democrats in Congress. No war going on. You don't believe me? OK, what are the war aims? Reconciliation of Shia and Sunni?

OK, let's take that one. Reconciliation. Is there someone our army can go and kill, whose demise will bring about reconciliation, and victory? No? Well, there you are. If there isn't somebody your army can go and kill, whose death means victory, you're not in a war. Very goddamn simple, as my old DI used to say.

If prestige can be defined as "a reputation for taking effective action in one's own interest", it's safe to say the US has squandered any prestige it ever had in that part of the world.

Very good point. Iraq is not a war, its an occupation. And a mismanaged one at that.

But to be fair, wars almost always have entailed a process of reconstruction after the end of hostilities, and the political, social and economic processes that go on are often administered by the occupying victors. This was certainly the case in Japan after WWII, where the allied military administration stayed for more than five years and spearheaded a complete transformation of Japanese society into a free-market democracy.

The biggest problem with Iraq was that the Bush administration dishonestly minimized the likely problems after a military victory. Our troops were going to be greeted as liberators, and democracy was going to magically flourish in a matter of a few months, or a year or two. A more realistic assessment of the situation would likely have shown that taking on the problems of reconciling and rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq was simply not worth the cost to American society. Whether we ultimately succeed or fail in Iraq, whatever the case may be, it wasn’t worth it. Iraq was never a serious threat to us, and as hard-hearted as it may seem, taking on and trying to fix the myriad problems of this screwed-up society was never in our national interest.

it's just good statecraft.

OK, you hear a lot about, well, we always occupy after the war, so of course we had to do it this time. But this was more like an oversized raid than a war, and more like Panama than Japan.

Killing Saddam's regime demonstrated to the other Sunni regimes what they could look forward to if their intelligence services didn't start reigning in the nutballs, and if they didn't stop supporting anti-american violence. It was a great way to get the arab regimes to crack down on terrorists, lest they be next in line after Saddam.

Even now, after dithering aimlessly for 4 years, all we have to do is

1) eradicate the word reconciliation from our vocabulary

2) decide what are the one or two valid security interest we have in the region

3) inform the players there they can do what they want, including wipe each other off the face of the earth, as long as they don't threaten our one or two security interests, because if they do

4)our army will go back to doing what it does best, which is large scale mayhem, and regime-killing, after which we will

5)offer the same deal to their successors, and

6) repeat 1 thru 5 as necessary until somebody catches on

Also, Iraq can not become a successful free-market democracy when there is no free-market.

Instead of hiring and employing Iraqi contractors, builders and engineers and encouraging Iraqi business, we are giving no-bid contracts to American companies. These contracts are cost+ , which is the antithesis of efficiency. And on top of all the that, these companies are hiring foreign workers.

Part of why I’m torn about Iraq is that I’m afraid that "we" have created a situation that’s even worse than it was under Saddam, and that "we" are responsible for the current situation because "we" knowingly chose to be bamboozled by Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz when we had Hans Blix and his crew on the ground telling us otherwise. I would regret it if a precipitous withdrawal of our forces resulted in widespread slaughter and ethnic cleansing.

But the thing is, to a significant extent, this has already happened, and even those of us with more do-gooder tendencies have to question if our presence there is only temporarily forestalling the ultimate return to tyranny. Now that the Brits have left in the South, didn't they essentially leave a de-facto Shiite thug-ocracy to replace the secular thug-ocracy they had under Saddam?

Things just have a way of turning out wrong when you have no honest principles, no wisdom and no sensible strategy.

Well done,gentlemen. It's SO refreshing to read sane,intelligent,well meaning discourse on our #1 National Problem.

All the best.