http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030908-480298,00.htmlLast week the President restated the obvious: retreat is not an option. Iraq cannot be left an anarchic, terrorist state. .....But the President has stubbornly resisted sharing with the American people a detailed assessment of the situation in Iraq: the fact that we may still be there a decade from now at a cost of hundreds of billions. The Pentagon — the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, that is — stubbornly insists that it retain control of all aspects of the Iraq operation and that no increased manpower is needed. Oddest of all, the Pentagon retains its neoconservative fantasy that Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress — who misled the Administration on weapons of mass destruction and on the rose petals that would greet the American liberators — may yet be coronated leader of a population that barely knows who he is.
State expects only 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers. And a deal will be difficult: the U.N. will agree to American control of the military operations, but not civil administration. "No Bremer," an international diplomat told me. "He's not done very well."
A Pentagon official told me the idea of reactivating the army is "naive"--which is ironic, given the Pentagon's willful naivete about postwar Iraq. But I suspect that all these options will be attempted in the coming months, lest George W. Bush face the electorate in 2004 as the President who presided over a severe degradation of the U.S. military and the diminution of America's reputation in the world — as the President who lost Iraq.
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