How Bush Can Win

Excellent analysis from Robert Dreyfuss (author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam). I can't sum it up better than this:

. . . In regard to the crucial question of whether President Bush's stay-the-course strategy can succeed . . . the answer, unfortunately, is: Yes, it can.

The Bush administration's strategy in Iraq today, as in the invasion of 2003, is: Use military force to destroy the political infrastructure of the Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces; eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to the U.S.; create a new political class willing to be subservient to our interests in the region; and use that new Iraq as a base for further expansion.

To achieve all that, the President is determined to keep as much military power as he can in Iraq for as long as it takes, while recruiting, training, funding, and supervising a ruthless Iraqi police and security force that will gradually allow the American military to reduce their "footprint" in the country without entirely leaving. The endgame, as he and his advisors imagine it, would result in a permanent U.S. military presence in the country, including permanent bases and basing rights, and a predominant position for U.S. business and oil interests.

Yep. What he said. I just wish progressives could stop using the term "failed mission" and harping on incompetency when describing the Iraq misadventure, when, in reality, everything is going exactly as it was planned.