A recent Newsweek contains a column by Fareed Zakaria. As a context on what the new directino of American policy shuld be, he lists many of the blunders the Bush League made so far. (No, he doesn't include going in in the first place.) He makes it plain that "stepping down as the Iraqis stnad up" won't work.
Some comments, and the URL, after the jump.
The column can be found at:
Zakaria
His first point is that the number of troops that were scheduled for the invasion was totally inadequate. They could defeat the Iraqi army, but they couldn't police the country afterwards. (He doesn't say, but you can tell, that this blunder was exacebrated by firing all government workers -- including police and army.)
The unwillingness to send enough troops to maintain order contributed to both unrest and the reliance on partisan militias. Zakaria says that Sunnis still regard the forces that Bush lists as "the Iraqi army" as a Shiite militia. Far from being willing to rely on them, they fear them. As the army grows stronger, the Sunni reliance on Sunni militias will only grow more intense.
Bush accuses his critics of relying on hindsight, but Zakaria points out that all of this had been predicted ahead of time. The uniforms in the army originally planned a much larger force; the suits at the pentagon overruled them.
The issue of mismanagaing Iraq is one that we should concentrate on. Whether we should have gone in or not is a matter of the past. Whether we should continue control in the hands of people who have continually blundered is a matter of present decision. The Bush League can frame criticism of going to war as criticism of the troops -- it's a lie, but a fairly successful frame. Corecting how the occupation is managed, OTOH, is supporting the troops.