Iowan/Ohioan:

I understand quite well the point you were trying to make. After all, I'm an Ohio State Buckeyes fan. After the college football national championship game, I was the greatest coach you could fine. Me, and about a milion other Buckeye faithful. Your position is little more than warmed over Monday morning quarterbacking. On Sunday, the play caller is a genius when the play works and, on Monday, he's an idiot if it didn't. But you don' suggest a different strategy. You suggest pulling the team off the field.

This is a rather revealing rabbit-hole, so I'll wander down it a few yards. It shows that my analysis of your thought processes was on the money.

If the Ohio State players were getting literally killed instead of just figuratively (and it was a pretty definitive butt-kicking), you bet your life I'd have pulled them off the field. The prize (a trophy) would certainly not have been worth the cost, and in any case, the chances of their winning that trophy were extremely remote with a long way to go in that game. In Iraq, it's difficult for you guys to define the goal at all, and the chances of achieving a positive result seem as distant as Ohio State's entering the fourth quarter. You seem fixated on the W and L here, but there are larger purposes that escape your notice, such as casualties, and the broader struggle against the terrorists/Islamists, both of which are hurt by our Iraq occupation.

Another error in your analogy is that I am not Monday morning quarterbacking at all. I was on the Mall protesting BEFORE this mistake was made. I'm not telling you that Bremer could have done this or that and won a championship; I'm saying that this incursion was doomed from the start and the sooner it is ended the better for the United States. Since I (and many others) was right when I advised not invading, and Bush was spectacularly wrong, it seems we have the wrong "coach" in any case.

OK. So no US deaths are justified. So the troops should be out of Iraq tomorrow since any delay will likely mean more unjustified deaths.

That would be fine with me. In practice, the military guys in here will tell us that a disengagement will take a few months for logistical and security reasons.

And what was the intelligent way to 'keep Vietnam divided'?

There was none. The intelligent way to prevent the spread of Communism in SE Asia would have been to recognize that the Viet Minh were the legitimate national force, and not to have jumped in to salvage part of France's empire. We could have engaged them; Ho Chi Minh worked with us against the Japanese. It is quite likely that Cambodia could have been kept out of the Communist orbit. Millions would not have been killed. Our blood, military might, and treasure could have been preserved instead of squandered on an unwinnable war. But the same football game mentality you exhibited above kept us in that conflict long after the leadership recognized that "victory" was unachievable.

What was the intelligent way to bring about regime change in Iraq?

We were doing what we reasonably could. Saddam was not going to be unseated that way, but we have all seen what happened after our ill-considered invasion, have we not? In the meantime, we could have used our might and leverage to advance the cause of democracy in ways that didn't kill a whole bunch of people, including Americans. No trophies would have been involved, though, so I don't expect you to have paid much attention to those opportunities.

What was the intelligent way to proceed with the war on terror (I'm making perhaps an unwarranted assumption that you favor a war on terror)?

The struggle against these religious fanatics is primarily a police matter, now that the only state that overtly supported them is gone. Iraq obviously had nothing to do with the war on terror except to make our position in it much worse. We needed to press Egypt, Saudi Arabia (those of us in the reality-based community know that the 9/11 hijackers came primarily from those countries and none came from Iraq), Pakistan, and our other "allies" to loosen up and allow a faster progression towards democracy. We needed to continue the police and intelligence work that has been capturing significant numbers of terrorists (unfortunately, Iraq has aided the recruitment of too many more to keep up with). We needed to be seen to be a responsible world power, and not step into the role that Osama bin Laden wrote for us by invading another Islamic country, this time without authorization from the world community or sufficient reasonable justification. We needed to commit more resources, military and financial, to the rebuilding of Afghanistan. And of course, we needed to lean on Musharraf to at least try to catch OBL. What we did not need was to waste tremendous resources to kill large numbers of Arabs and produce the images that al-Jazeera is delighted to beam into the homes of hundreds of millions a day. That, Iowan, was surpassingly stupid, as I told you before your Dear Leader did it.

Well, which is it, char? Did al-Qaeda lack the capacity and assets for further attacks, or is it clear that they would continue their attacks?

I think they lacked the capacity then, but with a nation at their disposal, they may very well have regained it. If you gave this any thought, I believe you would have reached the same conclusion.

Which intelligence organizations, specifically, denied that Iraq had WMDs?

The only one that was actually there, the inspectors, were telling us that they'd found nothing and needed a few more weeks to confirm that there was nothing. You know this. You just didn't believe them, but you were wrong. Even by Powell's speech at the UN the WMD fiction was unravelling. Hardly anyone outside the US believed him, because their own intelligence agencies were telling them that Powell was lying. As it turns out, he was.

Contain him militarily?

We were containing him militarily, at no loss of life to us. Don't you remember?

But if we had succeeded, then we would have been just plain right about the invasaion. Yes, I understand your calculus, char. Victory means that the cause was worthy and defeat means the cause wasn't worthy. Got it.

I'm pretty sure you are not as stupid as you are pretending to be. When you pick an unnecessary fight and you lose, that was a really dumb mistake. Your mistake.

That remains to be seen.

The losses in men, honor, prestige, treasure, and influence are so great that it is difficult to imagine any result that could justify them now.

To which 'plan' do you refer, char? The plan for an immediate withdrawal? Hillary's plan to not set a timetable on withdrawal and to also set a timetable of January 2009 upon her inauguration? Or is it Obama's plan, to start withdrawing troops by this May and the withdrawal to be complete by March 2008? Or is it Feingold's plan to defund the whole shebang? Or is it the plan to pass a toothless resolution opposing the surge? Which of those plans will prevent more US deaths and how?

Any plan that reduces the numbers of Americans fighting Iraqis is better than Bush's. I'm more concerned about moving in the right direction than the exact speed.

Neither is defeat [admirable]. But you don't seem to mind that.

It's all about the Ws and Ls to you, isn't it? There are some things more important than bragging rights, but I've given up trying to explain that to you. I heard everything you're saying now in the 1960s and early 1970s, and all it was was a deluded rationalization for throwing more lives away. "Losing" in Vietnam turned out not to be half the disaster that the war itself was.

This is not a football game. If it were, the coach should be fired for his performance and the athletic director fired for scheduling it. George H W Bush was not a particularly good President and made some big mistakes himself, but he at least knew better than to wade into Baghdad without a plan and without enough troops trusting that everything was going to turn out fine. We have to start using our brains here and try to figure out how to minimize the fallout from our mistake. Kidding yourself that it was not a mistake is just pathetic at this point.