Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

If there are (one speculates) 15 areas of Iraq in which the insurgents are embedded with special defensive ingenuity, the commanding general can elect to dispatch bombs and artillery, always with some care for collateral damage done to innocent civilians. But that approach, a platonic alternative to sending in a battalion with instructions to root out the offenders, means a diminished exposure of American soldiers to high-cost engagements.

To reason that this is happening is deductive: fewer casualties, fewer engagements. However, fewer engagements should presume an enemy diminished in size and potency. But to say that runs us into the corresponding figure, of 1,500 Iraqi civilian deaths. Somebody is killing those people, and the whole idea of the U.S. enterprise was to shield the Iraqi population not only from the depredations of Saddam Hussein, but also from successor killers. Manifestly this has not happened, if the killing proceeds at so high a rate.

I have myself concluded that our Iraqi mission has failed. Missions have to be judged successes or failures with some reference to a time scale. If that scale is stretched forever, it is not authentically tested. If the mission is to liberate the Prisoner of Zenda and 10 years later he is still in jail, the mission can reasonably be classified as having failed, never mind that in the 15th year he is actually rescued. Given our mission's failure in Iraq, the job in hand becomes to retreat with care, certainly with more care than we exercised in our retreat from Vietnam.

But one would expect the military to pay greater attention than if hellbent on the mission's accomplishment to such factors as risk to U.S. personnel. The welcome lightening of the casualty figures can be seen as the military voting with their feet to begin withdrawal from an enterprise that has proved costly beyond the successes achieved.