All the king's horses and all the king's men

I agree with WallDon-- a fine piece by Josh Marshall today, reflecting on the brouhaha over Sen. Reid's "the war is lost" comment.

Frankly, the whole question is stupid. . . . We had a war. It was relatively brief and it took place in the spring of 2003. The critical event is what happened in the three to six months after the conventional war ended.
[snip] We're occupying Iraq because continuing to do so allows us to pretend that the initial plan wasn't completely misguided and a mistake. If we continue to run the place a bit longer, the reasoning goes, we'll root out this or that problem that is preventing our original predictions from coming to pass. And of course the longer the occupation continues we generate more and more embittered foes to frame this rationalization around, thus creating an perpetual feedback loop of calamity and self-justification.

I, too, had been thinking lately (and now wish I'd blogged it), that the talk of "winning" or "losing" in Iraq is misplaced, now that our military is in effect acting as an occupying force. The coalition forces have already "won", militarily speaking. But as Colin Powell (sigh) once said, "if you break it, you own it."

So it's humpty-dumpty time now. You can call what is happening "losing" (as in "losing the peace"), I suppose, but "systemic failure" or "morass" is more like it. Given the sectarian conflicts of Iraq, and the intrinsic problems of America's conflict of interests in the region, the post-war failure was most likely unavoidable. But the political and managerial incompetence of The Regime, which can't even address the aftermath of the Katrina disaster in one major US city, there was and is no chance that we could really put Iraq "back together again." [Update: on the military's share in this incompetence, see the comments of Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, reported in AmericaBlog.] Unfortunately the US military presence is itself now part of the problem, as Marshall points out: the boots and tanks keep breaking those eggshell fragments into smaller and smaller pieces.

To ruin the metaphor: please, enough eggs have been broken, trying to make this omelette. It's time to bring the military home.