Right beside the interview I mentioned below in that same 2-day-old Sunday paper is an article headlined It's time for the endgame by Victor T. Le Vine which points out the lessons to be learned from history regarding current policy in Iraq. It begins with these two paragraphs:

President George W. Bush's new Iraq policy is intended to stabilize Iraq so that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki finally can have the political space in which to govern, and the US military can exit the country at last.

At best, the policy is whistling in the deadly Iraqi dark. At worst, it's another example of a classic war dilemma: trying to extricate ourselves from a catastrophic foreign venture on which we never should have embarked.

The author discusses the difficulty in crafting a viable exit strategy for military ventures gone awry using the examples of ourselves in Vietnam and Beirut and Mogadishu, the Russians in Afghanistan, and the French in Algeria. He concludes with the disastrous invasions of Spain and Russia by Napoleon:

Arrogance, blind ambition, underestimation of his enemies and miscalculation drove Napoleon to invade Spain and Russia. Yet he left the French with only retreat or surrender as exit strategies in both situations.

The French, with long experience in trying to extricate themselves from traps of their own making, had a phrase for it: "Sauve qui peut!" - get out as soon as you can with what, and those, you can save.

I'm sure dubya would fail to see the parallels here, but it's painfully obvious from a historical perspective that the invasion and occupation of foreign lands is, in the long term, rarely a successful endeavor. Regardless of nationality, people are invariably resentful of an occupying army and therefore, short of genocide, the occupying army never really owns the land it's occupying. It eventually comes down to finding a way to end the occupation with something resembling honor. Some negotiated peace in order to claim a semblance of victory, but a core principle of war is the notion that the victors are the ones sitting atop the land when the fighting ceases.

I agree with Le Vine that we've reached that point in Iraq, but our preznit isn't anywhere close to that conclusion yet. He has declared a "global" war against any and all enemies that he defines, told the rest of the world they were either with us or against us, invaded two countries and is now bristling for a third. He thinks he's kicking ass and taking names. This is a history lesson that dubya needs to learn in the worst way. Someone needs to show him that this has been tried a few times before and it never ends well.