A "failure of strategy"

John Podhoretz:

THE word from Washington is that everybody in and around the Bush administration agrees the new strategy for Iraq requires a surge of U.S. troops. Everybody, that is, except the military leadership at the Pentagon - which reportedly doesn't want more troops committed to Iraq.

Now, you'd think that would be the trump card of all trump cards. So what if the State Department wants more troops? What does State know about fighting a war? So what if National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley is pushing for more troops? He's a policy wonk, not a general.

For the past 31/2 years, it has been the trump card when it comes to the war in Iraq. Properly fearful of repeating the calamitous micromanagement mistakes of Vietnam - when President Lyndon Johnson sat in the Oval Office picking targets in the North - President Bush ceded the war to the generals and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. What they've asked for, they've gotten. They have the troop levels they want. They have had the strategy they have preferred.

And they've failed.

Now, don't mistake me. Americans in uniform haven't failed. They've performed their assigned mission with all the glory of heroes throughout history. It's their leaders who have failed them.

Their leaders haven't sought victory - real victory - since April 2003, after they secured the initial military objective of toppling the Saddam regime. Following a staggering battlefield triumph in which a massive advancing army moved as quickly as a Kenyan doing the 400-yard dash, the civilians and the military honchos at the Pentagon seemed to have decided that what was happening inside Iraq wasn't exactly a war.

Time and again, they took the lead in subordinating the pursuit of victory to the goal of stabilizing and strengthening the internal politics of Iraq.

...

It is still premature to say the strategy the military pushed has failed. Where it has failed is in accomplishing its objectives within the time frame that America's political will has been willing to give it. The military has done a poor job of communicating the time needed for the strategy to be successful and has done an even poorer job of countering the enemy's media campaign which our media has adopted in large part. Pohoretz says that it is time for the military to be told to come up with a plan that can succeed in the time political constraints say they have left. By my count that is about two years.