So yeah, it's more war. Unless they've got that zombification thing worked out.
...Although Mr. Ricks writes that he is saddened by the war’s "obvious costs to Iraqis and Americans" and by "the incompetence and profligacy with which the Bush administration conducted much of it," he adds that he has come to the conclusion that "we can’t leave."
As Mr. Ricks sees it, the regional and global repercussions of failure in Iraq would be far more dire than those incurred by the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam — ranging, in this case, from a full-blown civil war to "a spreading war in the Middle East," from a stronger Iran presiding over a Finlandized Iraq to the rise of a brutal new Iraq led by "younger, tougher versions" of Saddam Hussein, who "by the time of the invasion was an aging, almost toothless tiger."
...It is a war, Mr. Ricks writes, that may well become "America’s longest war, passing the American Revolution and even the Vietnam War."
"No matter how the U.S. war in Iraq ends," he writes at the conclusion of this important and chilling book, "it appears that today we may be only halfway through it. That is, the quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq until at least 2015 — which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict."
In other words, he adds, "the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."
Well OK then.