Clearly just a bunch of BDSers who have no qualifications, a hatred of America, and a love of terrorists.

LOOK! Petraeus is holding something shiny! Look over there!

Signed,
Your media

When will these experts start calling this fiasco what it really is? It is not a war, it is an occupation and it is proceeding just like most occupations - Nazi German in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Russia. Great Britain in Ireland, and Israel in the Golan Heights, the West Banks and Gaza Strip.

Seriously, we can not "win" an occupation. All we can do is bleed soldier and civilian blood and money over there until we run out of one or the other.

If we'd all stop calling this a war and treat it as the occupation that it's been for years now, we'd probably be able to coalesce around a much smarter, cheaper, less destructive approach. A war can be won or lost, so there's a national pride that gets in the way of reason. An occupation can only be managed, so there's no shame or defeat in withdrawing. George Bush won the war. Mission accomplished. Pride saved. Now let's manage the occupation. We can't let McCain frame withdrawal as defeat.

I see as I'm finishing this that disgusted citizen has a similar message. I'm with you, Disgusted.

Lying a country into a war is worse than terrorism!

There has been an aversion to truth-telling on Iraq for quite some time. See the obvious differences between Petraeus testimony, and the Pentagon Institute report released today...

It's really sad to watch as Bush runs out the clock on his Presidency and Iraq. In a few months, he will run off to Crawford, leaving the next President with a nice juicy shit sandwich. Thanks.

How does a debacle that never should have begun and has caused us so much financial, military and diplomatic harm become a "must win?" When you step into a quagmire, forward is hardly ever the right way to go.

They are low balling the number of Iraqi dead. Iraq Body Count which ONLY counts deaths enumerated in the media has the number at 82-90,000. Obviously an underestimate.

The Lancet survey has the most probable estimate at 650,000 for excess mortality. A WHO survey finds 150,000 deaths due to violence (extrapolation yields 400,000 excess deaths). http://www.prwatch.org/node/7034

You know what the real shame is here? Even when one of these people try to tell the truth they still lie to themselves and their audience with statistics. When Collins cites casualty statistics he omits from mention that private contractors (read: foreign mercenaries) have lost more personnel in Iraq than the U.S. Military has.

He cites a figure for refugees from this war at 15% of the Iraqi population. Define refugee. When people finds themselves trapped in compromised domiciles with 1 - 3 hours of electricity per day and no access to potable water; in temperatures that reach 138 degrees in the shade, I submit that those people meet the criteria for refugees. The present refugee population of Iraq is easily 50% of the population. In fact I suspect the 80/20 law is closer to the truth in this case. I submit that an honest reading of the situation would put 80% of the population into the category of refugees. The only portion of the country that is presently open for business and not on some form of a refugee footing is Kurdistan.

When Collins talks of cost in American treasure he says that cost has exceeded 450 Billion. The real cost including incidental expenses and unintended consequences is somewhere between 2.5 and 3 Trillion dollars.

As long as we continue to allow our leaders to lie to themselves and ourselves, this situation and the worldwide denigration it has created and is evolving will increase instability in this country. This constitutes a direct threat to the continued existence of the United States of America.

And finally I submit:

When the Executive Branch in collusion with the Legislative and Judicial Branches of Government completes its decimation of the Bill of Rights, the United States of America will have ceased to exist; regardless of what we choose to call it.

Taking issue with Collins over how many Iraqi dead or any other stats is irrelevant. The conclusion he comes to is correct. It's a debacle.

If he uses the Lancet figures he'd have the wingnuts using those figures to discredit and ignore the whole study.

Try to keep on message folks: the occupation of Iraq isn't the solution to the problem, it is the problem.

A representative from The Heritage Fnd was on C-SPAN's Washington Journal today and he used the word "win" when referring to the war in Iraq.

The author of the report mentioned here also used the word "win" in Iraq.

I believe there are too many definitions of the word "win" when referring to the Iraq war. I tried to get thru to C-SPAN to ask the guest to define the word, but alas, I never got thru.

So the opinion that ; "We have to win in Iraq" or "We can't leave until we win," needs to be followed by ONE universally accepted definition of the word.

After hearing all the rhetoric about Iraq for the last 5 years, all the bullshit Bush and his cohort served up, in my opinion the definition of winning in Iraq is; seeing the Kurds, Shia and Sunnies marching arm in arm under the sunshine of DEMOCRACY, PEACE and PROSPERITY.

Anything less cannot be defined as winning.

I have to disagree with TPM's position that this study is "important." First of all, it's neither a "Pentagon study" nor a "National Defense University study." It's an occasional paper by an affiliated scholar of the Institute for National Security Studies, which is itself an affiliate of the NDU system. There's nothing "official" in the document, in the sense of constituting an admission or acknowledgment or other kind of smoking gun.

Collins has been working on this paper for at least a year (I saw an early draft), but there's comparatively little in it that is new. Most of the paper, in fact, is dedicated to recommendations for changes to national security decision-making processes and actually has very little to do with Iraq proper -- the bulk of the "Iraq part" itself is centered on a traditional analysis of the inter-agency in planning before and early in the war.

On Iraq, Collins' conclusions, while certainly shared by the progressive blogosphere, are hardly earth-shattering: "our efforts there were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East." A recent N.I.E. made the first point -- and made it better -- and the notion that Iran is "emboldened" and is now "expand[ing]" would sit well with anyone at the _Weekly Standard_.

In short, this is a quick precis of things most people already know/believe; the lion's share of the document is not about Iraq; and the overall tone of the paper, despite its bold opening statement, is consistent with center-right discourse on the war ("impressive progress in security during the surge," "obvious progress under General David Petraeus").

profburgos.blogspot.com

This report's conclusion is unbelievably disingenuous due to the very foundation upon which it is based. A study from the US Military, for the US Military, using only "official" facts and figures provided/approved by the US Military cannot in any way be objective. Thus this report cannot be taken seriously.

What we have here is a conveniently timed argument for sustaining the "surge" no matter how "well" it may be going. It's just another in a long line of BS defenses for Bush's state of perpetual war.

-AF
Andrew Sullivan Is A Fraud

AF -- I think your comment misses something important in the release of this paper from NDU:

That a former official wrote a paper under the aegis of NDU and called the Iraq operation a 'major debacle' is a big step in the right direction.

It may not be the wholesale rejection of the disastrous policy of the Bush administration that many of us outside prefer, for Joe Collins to write this is brave and bold. And the paper is pretty good,too, with lots of boring wonk-y stuff about how to strengthen the process and systems that failed and allowed President Bush to cause this fiasco.

Saying "no one" has or hasn't done something can be invalid as a premise. There could be something we don't know:

"No one has calculated the psychopolitical impact of a perceived defeat on the U.S. reputation for power . . . ."

In fact, someone did just that, but used an actual-speculated-defeat of US military power, prompting shame, rage, and frustration. In their view, the psychopolitical impact of a defeat of the US military could prompt the military to do this. It was the author's view that the speculated defeat would cause some to demand swift action to hold those accountable for the military defeat. The reputation of power is one that can quickly evaporate, and re-emerge like a Phoenix with deadly consequences. Some may view the GOP's recklessness in far too narrow a lens. We were supposed to have learned the lessons of Vietnam.

It would have been better to say, "We have no record" or "We are not aware of any evidence that . . ." or "Our research finds no evidence that anyone has ever. . ."