The war is lost.

       I’m sorry. But I should tell the American people. The war is lost. We’re not going to win. And since not winning is not winning from a strictly military standpoint, it’s something else.

       In Iraq we first tried to “shock and awe” them with our military power and hardware, and that didn’t work. Now we’ve fixated on a new term, “the surge.”

       Briefly, we will flood Baghdad with more troops. Briefly, things will look maybe sort of temporarily promising.

       Briefly.

       The bad guys, who think we’re the bad guys, are already making their own strategy to counter our strategy. It will be a repeat of what one general called “Pillsbury Doughboy.” You push them in one area, and like the doughboy, they bulge out in another. They’ll set up shop in another area until the surge goes away.

       Eventually, they know it will go away. Eventually, American troops will go away.

       The bad guys, who think we’re the bad guys, know this. We didn’t shock and awe them enough. When American troops do eventually go away, the bad guys will turn their attentions to the regime we set up. We hope our puppet regime has improved in dealing with the bad guys. They’ve improved.

       But so have the bad guys. They’ve vastly improved because they’ve been fighting us.

       There will be no decisive military victory. No one will surrender to us.

       If we’re only attempting a military solution…..we’ve lost.

       We didn’t win the hearts and minds of more than fifty percent of the Iraqi people. We tried to impose democracy by force.

       That’s why we lost.

       We tried to use a conventional army to be a city police force, a role for which it is unsuited. Armies fight other armies in the field. That’s what they’re for. Not for chasing vagabonds across rooftops at dusk.

       That’s why we’ve lost.

       We’re a foreign occupying power. No matter how right we are. We will always be foreign. It’s their country. They’re not going anywhere. We are. They can wait us out. They can lay low. They have options.

       We can’t defeat them militarily, wipe them out root and branch. But they don’t have to defeat us to win. All they have to do is survive. Ask the Palestinians. We have to win to win. They don’t.

       That’s why we’ve lost.

       Like in Vietnam, our plan is nothing more than hoping they get tired and give up, and the government we set up fights and whips them. But the bad guys, who think we’re the bad guys, have so far done well enough against both us and our Iraq allies.

       We surrendered our moral authority when we attacked another country for no other reason than we didn’t like its leader. We wouldn’t like it if Pakistan decided to attack India to replace its head of state.

       This is the second war we’ve lost. Vietnam was the first. Being in the right doesn’t mean you always win.

       Iraq will be settled politically, not from military action. The final government we will see in Baghdad ten years from now will be a hybrid very different from what we have now.