How do we lose?

You should go read Sidney Blumenthal's latest column, Far Graver than Vietnam. It contains several quotes from interviews with the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, who agree that Bush's war is already lost. A few of the key quotes:

Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

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Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."

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"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."

General Odom said: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."

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General Hoare believes from the information he has received that "a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it - after the election. The signs are all there."

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General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida."

Don't say we didn't warn you. I hear again and again, "Now that we are there, we have to figure out how to win it." Sorry, but that's a fantasy. There is no winning this. If Russia can't even subjugate tiny Chechnya with entirely better intelligence and immensely more brutal methods, if Israel can't achieve it with Palestine, then we don't stand a chance in hell of doing it to Iraq. We never did. Figuring out how to win in Iraq is not an exercise in reality. We need to figure out how to lose and get the hell out of there as fast as we can.

Does that leave a dangerous situation? You're damn skippy it does. A horrific one that will be a threat to us for years to come. But again, we told you this would be the result. We told you Bush was signing on for years of frontless, bloody guerrilla warfare. We told you it would end up running into the hundreds of billions of dollars we didn't have. We told you we would be seen as occupiers. We told you this would create a vacuum to be filled by the worst criminal elements in the region. We told you it would increase, not decrease, terrorism and provide the best recruitment poster al Qaeda could ever have. We told you it would speed the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. We told you the initial invasion would be the easiest part of the whole operation and that Bush had no plan for what followed.

We. Told. You. And for that, we were called (at best) unpatriotic and defeatist but more often just strings of obscenities. Well, here's what I'm telling you now: fuck you, bomb-happy flag-wavers. You wanted your splendid little war? Now you have it. This isn't gloating, it's anger. I would much rather have been proven wrong. And quit with the ridiculous "the media isn't reporting the good news" crap. The news is far worse than you think. Meanwhile, the media is spending all its time on freaking Vietnam service.

History will record this as America's biggest foreign policy blunder in the modern era, and maybe ever. So please, feel free to explain to me again how opposing this debacle made me "objectively pro-Saddam" and an appeaser of terrorists and unwilling to defend our country and a weak-willed, liberal, pacifist naïf. Just don't be surprised when you're picking yourself up off the floor after you say it.