tw nailed it exactly... until he got to his conclusion. The addition of more troops does little to protect soft infrastructure targets. We can't assign a trooper to every person in Iraq.
The Democratic contenders are truly screwed. There is no reasonable way to end the conflict, but how can you run on that? The best we can hope for is the end of neo-conservatism and its stunning hubris. That will be up to Bush, is he willing to say he was completely mislead into a conflict unrelated to American security?
From
Lew Rockwell
Let's start with the big error. They believed that their will alone was enough to make and remake a country (whether Iraq or Afghanistan) and the world. They saw people as pliable, all events as controllable, and all outcomes as the inevitable working out of a well-constructed plan. Being the top dogs of the world's only superpower, they never doubted their ability to dictate the terms and so they had no plan for what to do if things went wrong.
This forgets several essential components of the structure of reality. People's free will is often backed by the willingness to undertake enormous sacrifice. Such sacrifices are made every day by average Iraqis. Most especially it overlooks certain underlying laws that limit what is possible in human affairs. In the scheme of how the world works, even the largest state is only a bit player. It is capable of creating enormous chaos and transferring huge amounts of wealth, but not of controlling events themselves. Government action often generates results opposite of those the policy is constructed to create.
The Bush administration did not want to believe this. They had a very simple model in mind, namely that Iraq was a country lorded over by a single dictator, and so all that was necessary to take over the country was to displace (decapitate) the dictator and install a new form of government that would run the country according to the liking of the Bush administration. It further believed that all resistance could be crushed by a proper application of violence and the threat of violence.
The truth is that no society operates like this. Human beings don't respond well to being treated like prisoners in someone else's central plan. If the desire is to wholly manage the future, the mega-planner is always a mega-failure, if not always in the short term certainly always in the long term. The Bush administration had bigger dreams than Wilson or FDR. But as Maureen Dowd aptly puts it: "The group that started out presuming it could shape the world is now getting shoved by the world."