Posted 6:41 PM by steve

I'll use Israel's recent foray into Gaza, widely viewed as a success, in Gaza to illustrate what I think Bush should have done in Iraq...

Israel had some grand - and unachievable - goals. Israel would have liked to finish off Hamas and replace it with a government friendly to Israel and totally supportive of Israel's right to exist... but that wasn't going to happen.

So instead of chasing after windmills, Israel limited itself to accomplishing what it could accomplish: a major degradation of Hamas's ability to strike at Israel, elimination of several high-ranking Hamas officials, killing a whole lot of Hamas terrorists, eliminating the tunnels Hamas uses to smuggle arms into Gaza, destroying facilities Hamas used to attack Israel, and causing Hamas to lose face (by doing such a bad job of fighting back against the Israelis) among the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world.

As a result, the Israelis limited their losses and expenditures. By not sticking around, they didn't lose the (limited) support they had by turning themselves into occupiers. By keeping things simple, they didn't jeopardize Israeli public support for going after Hamas.

Now contrast that with Bush's actions with Iraq. He could have gone in, gotten rid of Hussein, found and destroyed whatever there was of Hussein's WMDs and left Iraq to the Iraqis to sort out. And just as Israel has preserved for itself the right to attack Hamas again and again if they don't get their act together, so too could Bush have sent troops and air strikes into Iraq over and over if whoever replaced Hussein resorted to Hussein's old habits.

Had Bush taken this approach, over 3,000 more Americans would be living today and tens of thousands of our soldiers wouldn't be missing arms and legs and parts of their brains. Had he done so, we would have saved somewhere north of $500 billion. Had he done so, our military wouldn't have been stretched so thin and our efforts in Afghanistan wouldn't have had to take a back seat to Iraq. Had he done so, the Democrats would have had to look for something else to attack him on. Had he done so, he wouldn't have fed the Muslim view that we were occupiers. Had he done so, our international reputation wouldn't have taken such a hit.

But no, he had to chase after windmills, he had to chase the unattainable. And for all the talk about Bush 'winning' in Iraq, the fact remains that while he has indeed won the military fight (which,, for all the naysaying, was never in doubt), he still hasn't accomplished what he set out to do: turn Iraq into an ally of ours, supportive of our interests and our friends (the Iraqi support for Hamas is illustrative of how Bush has missed on this goal) and an ally in the war against terror (while Iraq may not be an active participant in planning and supporting terrorist attacks, they are no where near being a supporter of the fight against terror).

Put another way, Bush wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives to accomplish nothing more than he could have accomplished with a whole lot less money and military losses. That's not winning.

And this is my last post on Bush... he's gone and good riddance...