How the Left Is Wrong About Iraq

It all depends on one's defintion of success.......

AlterNet: War on Iraq: How the Left Is Wrong About Iraq:

"The war in Iraq was not a 'mistake.' It was a deliberately calculated exercise of U.S. power with a specific end in mind -- namely, control of Iraq and the Persian Gulf region. It was illegal and remains so. It was a war crime and remains so. Its perpetrators were war criminals and remain so. Its goals were unworthy and remain so.

Few Democrats, and almost no Republicans, have been willing to challenge Bush's war on these terms, however. Neither have most of the Bush administration's so-called mistakes truly been errors: the brutal dismantling of the Baath party and the dissolution of the Iraqi armed forces, widely castigated now as 'mistakes' by many Bush critics, were meant. They were thought out. They were planned with purpose. They, too, were deliberate actions aiming at U.S. hegemony in Iraq.

Nor is the war simply, or even largely, a 'failure.' As cruel and brutish as it is, it is grinding its way toward its goal. Victory for the United States in Iraq, as evidenced by the recitation of bad news I cited earlier, is by no means certain. But it is far too early to call it a failure either. To do so at this stage is Capra-esque. It assumes that bad guys don't win. But sometimes they do. And on Iraq, the jury remains out.

The danger of emphasizing the supposed 'mistakes' and 'failures' of the Bush administration's Iraq policy is that it plays into a notion held by an increasingly large component of centrists in both parties -- that, although the war itself was a 'mistake,' the only rational option for the United States now is to win it anyway. There are countless variations on this theme emanating from both Democratic and Republican centrists."