May 09, 2007.
I hear the right-wingers, the hawks, all talk about how we MUST win the war in Iraq. Their best battle maneuver against left-wing liberal talkers is to put them on the spot and accuse them of not wanting to win the war.

Newsflash:
THE ONLY ONES WHO HAVE TO WIN THE WAR IN IRAQ... ARE THE IRAQIS!

Why the hell do we need to win some other country's Civil War? We aren't even supposed to be there.

The situation we've got is a little bit like the one in World War 2... Both the Nazis and the Communists were our enemies. But the Nazis were the ones who declared war against us. Fortunately, FDR and Truman and Ike were smart enough to know we needed them to win, and disciplined enough to put put all differences aside and tolerate being on the same side as the Communists. Now, it's al-Qaeda who declared war on us. We need the Shia to win against them, but Bush is neither smart enough nor disciplined enough to do what he must. He's a spoiled brat who has never had to think anything all the way through in his life, and certainly never had to face the consequences of not bothering to do so.

We try to stop Iran from "interfering in Iraqi affairs" and deplore them because we find Iranian weaponry. So, our 150,000 troops over there are what... on vacation? Have the Iranians deployed 150,000 troops? Have we seen any Iranian armored vehicles, tanks, helicopters shooting at anything? If al-Qaeda is "on the run" in Iraq, as Bush would have us believe, it's as much due to the efforts of Iranian-backed Shia factions as it is to any offensives we've mounted.

The difference between this and our WW2 position, other than the intelligence of our screw-up-in-chief, is that the one we must fight (al-Qaeda) as a Sunni movement, has the backing of virtually all the other Muslim nations in the Middle East. The Iraqi government has the backing of only one... and Bush doesn't want them to talk to that one.