Mission Not Accomplished

I know what you think the big news of yesterday was, but you're mistaken. Trust me.

Yesterday's big news had nothing to do whether justice was or was not done in a courtroom in Santa Maria, California. It had nothing to do with child molestation or with self-proclaimed kings of pop. The real story yesterday was a series of statements that you didn't hear made by military officers of whom you've probably never heard. But those statements are enormously revealing, and you should know about them, and think about what they mean.

First was a statement by Brigadier General Donald Alston, who is the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. And what did he say? What was the statement that was so important that it stands comparison to Michael Jackson beating the rap on molesting kids?

This is what he said: "I think the more accurate way to approach this right now is to concede that ... this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations."

The top commander in Iraq, George W. Casey, agreed, referring to what he calls "the Pillsbury Doughboy idea," that idea being (according to Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder, which is where I got this report) that if you press the insurgency in one place, it will just pop up in another. As Lieutenant Colonel Frederick P. Wellman puts it, "We can't kill them all. When I kill one [insurgent], I create three."

So what do we conclude from this? What is the logical and pretty much inescapable conclusion to be drawn from these statements?

Very simple. The war is over in Iraq. And it looks like we've lost. We can't defeat this insurgency by military means. The U.S. military is dealing with a situation that is eerily reminiscent of Mickey Mouse's dilemma in the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" episode from "Fantasia": no matter how many brooms he chops up, more will appear to take the place of the ones that have been destroyed. We have created an insurgency that has metastasized far beyond our ability to control it – if we were ever able to do so. The fact is that we can fight this insurgency for the next ten years and we will not win. And it's time to admit it.

The late Colonel David Hackworth (whom I knew when we both worked at Newsweek), wrote a piece once where he talked about the record of the United States in fighting guerrilla wars, and pointed out that we've yet to win one. And as no less a conservative than Pat Buchanan points out in his recent book "Where the Right Went Wrong," insurgencies (by people who are always referred to as "terrorists" by those fighting them) tend to be successful. It would seem that Iraq is to the world of early 21st Century Arab fundamentalism what Spain was to the leftists of the late 1930s – the place to go to fight the good fight. They have an inexhaustible supply of wannabe suicide bombers – and what do we have? A military force that is overextended, underpaid, and greatly outnumbered.

This war is over. And we've lost it. The commanders on the ground have as much as acknowledged it. How long do you think it will take and how many more American lives will be lost before this administration finally sees what's right in front of their face?

Tom Moran