Planning for defeat.

I think this piece in the New Yorker (I know, it's from 2 weeks ago but I just caught up on my stack of New Yorkers) is quite good. The takeaway: there are no good options in Iraq.

Not sure I agree with this though:

Preparing a judicious withdrawal from Iraq will demand the integrated effort of the whole government, not just under this President but under the next one as well. “You just cannot pretend that the Iraq war never happened and everything can go back to how it was before,” the former Embassy official told me. “The status quo before 2003 no longer exists. We have introduced fundamental new disequilibriums into one of the most sensitive parts of the globe. How do you contain it?” He added, “People have to start thinking about these things—small study groups with military, State, and intelligence people sketching out what are the core interests on a regional level, and working back from that to discuss some options. If that’s been done, I don’t know about it.”

This, of course, assumes these "new disequlibriums" a) aren't mostly us and b) are something we can do about even if we tried. I've never been sold on the "we fucked it up now we have to fix it" argument because it assumes the people in charge are capable of doing so.