"Winning in Iraq"? You're kidding, right? "Winning" implies a goal was attained. What goal have we "won"?

Even if the ethnic violence in Iraq is less now than it was a year or two ago, so what? The result to date of the invasion has brought NO benefit to U.S. strategic or even imperial interests (if you favor that kind of thing) as a result of the Iraq War. What exactly, I ask you, have the hundreds of billions of dollars, the tens of thousands of wounded, and the thousands dead secured us? Security? No. Al-Qaeda weakened? No. Justice for 9/11? No. Regional stability? Hardly. Did we even cheap oil??? Nope, not even that! It's drained our bank account, ruined our reputation, weakened our military and strengthened our enemies more than it has hurt us:

The only "winner" has been the theocracy of Iran, which has had the #1 check on their regional and world ambitions--Saddam Hussein--removed courtesy of the United States and with our own blood and treasure.

Honestly, Howard, I would hate to see what you call a loss, or even a tie, if Iraq is your idea of a win.

The knee-jerk fervent hatred directed toward him always seemed at least slightly irrational and misplaced to me. Wouldn't want to have to walk the last 8 years in his shoes either.

Brian, how would you objectively rate Bush's foreign policy? Bush lacks the ability for introspection, and throughout his tenure, could not learn from his own experiences. I have written what I regard to be an objective take on his foreign policy--one can look at and refute the points. So, tell us why he did well.

Howard, define winning before you declare victory. For extra credit, use the definitions the Bush administration used in early 2003. Good luck.

How is it that a democrat elected Iraqi government and a US exit is not a goal achieved?

It's really amusing, Howard, that you've been tippling GOP Kool-Aid so long that you no longer have the capacity to use the adjective "democratically," even when it has nothing to do with American elective politics. I don't doubt that your eyes can therefore gaze upon the situation in Iraq and see success.

First of all, Howard, the time-table for leaving Iraq has already been set up by the Bush administration.

In regards to your definitions: "Winning is the opposite of losing." No, it isn't. Winning is achieving a goal. No strategic, economic, military or political benefit has been accrued to the U.S. by the Iraq War. In fact, the world has only been made far more dangerous by ignoring the real front in the war on terror--Afghanistan--and by freeing Iran to do as it pleases.

The result of "crying wolf" in regards to WMDs will surely come back to haunt us down the road, as it already is now that no one is willing to believe or support us in regards to Iran. That is the real legacy of our Iraqi adventure.

"Winning" a war means that you've reached some sort of stable state in the conflict. At this point, the only thing stable about Iraq is that there isn't as much violence as there was a couple of years back. But absent large numbers of US troops and a huge expenditure of American money, the situation would collapse pretty quickly.

Then there's the matter of the four million displaced Iraqis. A couple million of them internally-displaced and another couple million mostly in Jordan, Syria. Many of them have nowhere to return to, their presence in the neighboring countries is generally destabilizing to the region, and it'll likely cause problems down the road that someone other than George W. Bush will have to deal with. All part of the grand scheme, I suppose.

If anyone thinks the "surge" was anything more than a transparent attempt to hold things together for another year so that the Iraq War could be passed off onto someone else's plate, I've got a proverbial bridge to sell you. By staving off a collapse of Iraq until the election, Bush didn't have to actually either "win" or "lose" the war. Someone else is going to get stuck with that decision.

As to why so many people had "knee-jerk fervent hatred" of Bush since even before he was elected, wel count me in. I was pretty sure he was a whiny, ignorant, self-absorbed jerk just from watching him in interviews and debates back in 2000. Whiny, ignorant, self-absorbed jerks don't tend to make good presidents, in fact they have a propensity for screwing things up. And I really don't like seeing people screw up my country. I actually sort of hate it.

Howard, the rationale for invading Iraq was to bring security to the US. It was founded on the bogus rationale that Iraq was connected to al Qaida and possessed WMD. Now Iraq IS connected to al Qaida. Tell me how winning this war has ensured US security.

Everyone but George W. Bush and his band of merry neocon day-dreamers knew our troop levels were too low going into Iraq to successfully control the population. Go look at the Janes online assessments starting in 2003--the closest thing to a neutral, a-political opinion you're going to find--if you find my partisanship makes me an unreliable source. Remember that Shinseki guy? Most professional military planners agreed with him. John Kerry called for an increase of 40,000 combat troops to Iraq during his 2004 campaign.

The only thing worse than fighting a pointless war is to do it badly. Bush's correcting in 2007-2008 for mistakes made in 2003 and compounded in the intervening years by ignoring evidence is hardly laudatory.

The surge was an overdue correction packaged as a brilliant breakthrough: "Hey, I know, maybe more troops in the theater will help us control things better!" Well, duh, right? The application of intelligent counter-intelligence strategies that went along with the surge (and which, yes, have had success) only lead to the other question of why it took so long to implement techniques that have been standard since Vietnam and earlier. The answer seems to be: Bush, Rumsfeld, and of course, Cheney.

To get back to the broader themes that Jeff outlined, I'd like to offer this about Bush's management style and how it contributed to his record. Bush is responsible for getting us into Iraq, but Rumsfeld's advice and strategy seems to be a big part of why it has dragged on so long and so badly. Gates is a better secretary by far.

But the Bush administration has famously picked appointees for loyalty above competence, and returned loyalty in kind even in the face of staggering incompetence ("Heck of a job, Brownie," etc.) It's pretty clear Bush figured out Rumsfeld was a problem, and not just a political one, before he canned him after the 2006 elections. But he stuck by him for several years too long. I think this has been a pattern of our detail-challenged president: pick somebody you can trust to run the show, then rely on them for all your information--the proverbial "Bush Bubble." The well-known difficulties of both defense and intelligence experts for getting around Rumsfeld (and let's face it, Tenet) seem to have been compounded both by those leaders but also by Bush himself. I believe there are similar examples of this kind of management that run through and through the last 8 years (Cheney's free rein/reign for example.)

I don't know if this is part of the CEO 101 training Bush got as part of his Harvard MBA,i.e. "give your managers the space they need," but it's a management style they would do well to study and warn against to future would-be leaders.

The surge has by any and all legitimate assessments worked and has resulted in the stabilization of Iraq,

Not in any long-term sense it hasn't. The whole argument against removing US forces now is that the country would fall apart if we left. A country that falls apart when it's not being occupied by a foreign army is one in which the war hasn't been won. Maybe Obama thinks the surge actually worked, but then a lot of Democrats (and Republicans) were stupid enough to vote for the war in the first place, thinking that it would be over in a matter of weeks. Anyone with half a brain should have been able to tell that wasn't going to happen.

As for Clinton, I didn't like him much, either. But at least he didn't come off as an ignorant moron. Or at least someone who wanted you to think he was an ignorant moron. George Bush has made it a point to try to come off as someone who didn't take to book-learnin', making fun of people with educations, despite his own Yale and Harvard degrees. That kind of two-faced, willful display of unenlightened idiocy is a pathetic way to run a country. Smart people make mistakes enough, but ignorant people? They make even more.

As for your idea that Iraq's going hunky-dory these days, violence there is on the upswing. And the idea that large numbers of provinces have been turned over to the locals is pretty funny. Ground operations in some areas are under Iraqi control, but the US provides all of the helicopter and jet support. The US still controls all operations in the most populous areas.

Only trickles of refugees are coming back into the country or returning from where they've evacuated to in-country. Most of them are still refugees. Most areas still don't have the same level of water, sewer, or electrical service they had before the invasion. Not to mention all the housing that's been destroyed.

Foreign journalists in Iraq still can't go out on the streets without the threat of being attacked or kidnapped. Not, I suspect, that you care about journalists, but that was something they could do pre-2003. If the situation for foreigners in Iraq is still worse than it was in Saddam's day, is the war over?

Jeff, come on, I'm sure you've heard discussions on how a stable and friendly Iraq alli helps our security.

An "ally" that can't even manage to secure its own country by itself, that needs US support in dollars and military force just to keep its leaders in power is of absolutely no use as an ally. It's a black hole for money, materiel, and manpower. It's a South Vietnam.

I don't have to "spin" anything. All I have to do is read news reports. My assessment of the situation is far more accurate than yours; you can't even acknowledge the fact that there's a refugee problem in with Iraq. That's just not willing to face reality.

You don't even seem to understand that Iraq isn't likely to become a "long term ally" if American troops are pulled out. The Iraqi government is far friendlier with Iran than the US. Many of the leaders in the Iraqi government spent years in exile in Iran. George Bush had to go to Iraq under cover of secrecy, Ahmadinejad announced his visits in advance. Most of the population in Iraq is Shiite. The only other majority Shiite country in the world is Iran. You're living in a fantasy world if you think the US is going to be closer to Iraq than Iran is, unless it's at the point of an occupier's gun. And that doesn't make for much of an ally.

Jeff, I agree with most of your assessment, but there is an area in which Bush did OK. And it's very significant. That's China. Although Bush came into office with some in his administration seeing China a enemy number one (it seemed the great power most likely to challenge us and provided a great justification for expensive (and mostly unneeded) military systems), 9/11 and the war on terror changed their focus.

My favorite international strategist, Tom Barnett, has a new book coming out. He just put a quote from it on his blog (see here) I agree with the following, knowing it to be controversial (sorry it's a bit long):

"The lack of a serious U.S.-China confrontation in the years since 9/11 is the most important dog that did not bark during the Bush-Cheney administration. In the grand sweep of history, this is arguably George W. Bush's greatest legacy: the encouragement of China to become a legitimate "stakeholder" in global security--[Deputy Secretary of State Robert] Zoellick's term. This sort of effort at grooming a great power for a greater role in international affairs is a careful balancing act, and the Bush team sounded most of the right notes, from reassuring nervous allies in Asia, to avoiding the temptation of trade retaliation while simultaneously pressuring Beijing for more economic liberalization, to drawing China into the dynamics of great-power negotiation over compelling regional issues like the nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran. We can always complain that Bush-Cheney didn't do more to solidify what was the most important bilateral relationship of the twenty-first century, but we cannot fault them for any lasting mistakes, and that alone is quite impressive. Indeed, history will be likely to judge this success as greater than the Bush administration's failures in Iraq."