"By putting Iraq in play, they've opened up an entirely new front, one that sucks up people and resources at an alarming rate, but yields absolutely no offsetting advantages in the struggle against jihadism. It's become the 21st century version of Gallipoli -- at best, a bloody stalemate; at worst, a disastrous strategic defeat."

Link.

Billmon at The Whiskey Bar not only hit the nail on the head, he hammered it in with one blow.

Full disclosure: I sent an email to Joshua Marshall with much the same position a few weeks ago. Of course, Marshall has much more important things to do than reply to a complete unknown like myself, but I take some pride in both recognizing the situation AND trying to add my point of view to the public debate. The fact is that even a stalemate is a defeat for the Anglo-American alliance: besides costing an ever increasing amount in lives and money, a stalemate means that the mightiest military force the earth has ever seen can be defeated by a very small force of guerillas--if the latter has a supportive or even simply a passive population they can blend into when not actively engaged with the enemy.

I forget the link, although I think it was on the PBS website a few weeks back--(yeah, it was on PBS, and here is the link)--T.E. Lawrence managed to do remarkable things in the Middle East by relying on unconventional methods throughout the First World War. Was Lawrence racist? Probably--go to the site and judge for yourself. But he learned the terrain AND the people, and by doing so he scored spectacular successes against the Ottoman Empire, while Churchill's doomed plan at Gallipoli was an utter failure.

Meanwhile, Bush is proving himself incapable of staying on message (link also courtesy of Billmon). No wonder they won't let him out of his glass box when he's in the US. My favorite line in the article is this:

"His comment appeared to take top aides by surprise. As the president spoke, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice glanced pointedly toward the press corps assembled inside Britain's foreign office as if to suggest that there might be some clarification coming."

Some clarification coming. This reminds me of something from the old Hunter Thompson book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail . I'll be honest: I think Thompson lost his mojo years ago--probably dropped it down the sewer drain by accident following yet another night of binge [name your toxin(s) here]. Hell, I saw the guy speak at Tulane many years ago and thought he'd lost it (the fact that it was a Q and A format and the idiot Tulane students couldn't think of anything better to ask than Doonesbury questions didn't help). But anyway...

My point was about something Thompson wrote in regards to campaign managers--this was before the term "spin doctor" had become fasionable, but the description was dead on. He used Sodomy Laws as the example--I believe it went something like: The Campaign Manager job is to ensure that the message gets out. If, say, the candidate decides that Sodomy Laws should be repealed, then the Campaign Manager will go out of his way to insist that, indeed, the Sodomy Laws MUST be repealed, and this is of utmost concern. If, however, they discover that the public isn't exactly buying into this, it's the Manager's duty to insist that, in fact, the candidate hadn't actually called for the repeal of Sodomy Laws, but of Sodomy itself.

So, that's what we'll be seeing from Dubya's staff, as soon as he's safely placed back in his box. Meanwhile, the more reports I see about the bombing in Istanbul, the worse it seems. The War on Terror is bin Laden's wet dream, but the US public has gone along like we're dancing on a string. At least the British public had decided to they've had enough.