Harry Reid is not alone in his assessment. He is joined by people like Gen. Tony McPeak (retired), Member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War (see Rolling Stone magazine), and Henry Kissinger (in the International Herald tribune), who according to Bob Woodward has advised the current president on how to conduct the war, and William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, in the Washington Post.
I should also point out, John Mace, that Henry Kissinger also disagrees with your approach - even though the war is lost, a sudden pullout of U.S. Troops would cause chaos.
If I thought the war was “lost” (whatever that even means), I’d give the order to cease all pro-active combat missions immediately, and begin the withdrawal process ASAP, not giving any specific timeframe. I honestly believe that if we announced that policy, the Sunnis and Shi’a would be happy to concentrate on killing each other and let us get the fuck out of there pronto.
If Reid were Commander in Chief, you’d have a point. But he didn’ t say the majority of the Senate thinks the war is lost, or even the majority of Democrats do. I doubt he got to be Majority Leader by introducing bills with no hope of passage that would tie the Senate in knots.
A politician says something a bit risky that he believe in, and you have a fit. Any wonder our system is in a mess?
By the way, I’ve also read that just to move back all the material that has been shipped over to Iraq will take months of work and significant amounts of manpower.
Where did I have a fit? I just said it was a stupid thing to say, and it was. Reid obviously thought so, too, since he hemmed and hawed about it later on the Senate floor. Frankly, I don’t even know what it means to say that we’ve “lost”.
No! He’s a Democrat! 
…You are aware that with Lieberman voting for the war and Tim Johnson still out of commission, any vote (by party line) with everyone there would be 49-50? And thus the problem for Reid is to get 11 GOP senators for cloture and at least 2 to pass it? Which is no small feat?
OK. How many agree with him then? As I’ve said twice now, even **he **doesn’t seem to agree with himself on the subject anymore.
Consider what Iraq would have to look like for us to “win”, and then imagine it not looking like that.
I appreciate your attempt to answer the question, but that doesn’t really do it. Reid later said that we will lose as long as we follow Bush’s plan. Does that mean if we leave Iraq, we “win”? I think it’s meaningless to talk about winning and losing at this point. That’s like “stay the course” or “cut and run”. We need to determine what our best policy is, not worry about slogans. I generally agree with Reid about what we should do, but I still say it was a stupid thing to say. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and agree that he meant: we’ve done about as much as we can do, and we’re not helping much by staying there.
I’ll take that with a grain, as I have every confidence in your vocabulary.
Iraq has devolved into that geopolitical vampire, the “client state”. If you want to ask “When can we leave?”, you have also to ask “Who benefits from our staying?”.
Money. Who makes money from the American presence? Those boxcars full of Benjamins are going somewhere, someone with the brisk entreprenuerial spirit so admired by Americans. Someone with no apparent connection to our adversaries, someone we can, ah, trust. (As well, someone who is probably fronting for someone else who has the good sense not to let his collaborationist capitalism become public knowledge…)
Most likely you will find them lodged in the various nooks and crannies of the Maliki regime. I suspect quite a few have foreign passports, like the Man Who Will Never, Ever Be King, Ahmed Chalabi. When the going gets tough, they can get gone.
Since they have a vested interest in our continuing presence, they are disinclined to offer discouraging words. Which most likely means that we would be wise to regard any words from them as having topspin, the upside is emphasized.
Following that inexorable chain of reasoning, they are probably lying to us. If they say things is good, they are probably so-so (ah! wouldn’t* that* be great!..) If they tell us things is not good, they are probably wretched.
Obviously, our enemies have no reason for candor. But our allies cannot be entirely trusted, either. Huge, blind, and clumsy are we. We don’t know who to trust, we don’t know what’s going on. Victory under those conditions is impossible short of absolute and unrelenting military domination, or divine intervention.
So, yes, we have lost and continue to lose. Truth is the first casualty of war, and the Forces of Darkness will do everything in their power to blame that loss on the progressive left. I say, let them. If the people believe them, well, that’s shitty, but that’s democracy, so be it. They’re going to blame you anyway, might as well be hung for sheep as for lamb.
Out now.
Olympia Snowe is the 3rd Repub wanting out.
Kinda like Michelangelo sculpting David . . .
Apparently, David was a Slogan:
Which is far too esoteric for my sorry ass. Maybe the Nation needs to set up some sort of “study group” to determine what our best policy in Iraq would be? We finally want to approach this rationally, right? 
Is there a ‘Duh Award’ handed out in the Senate? If so, Reid gets my vote.
Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, R-Fuckwad said:
Fuck you, Mitch. He is the Democratic Leader, you putz.
They’re in their last throes. The U.S. army, that is…
[off-topic or maybe not]US style democracy – with a tad of German-Iraeli influence. Never mind China, which makes the prior three mere Lego wanna-be engineers.
How much dumber can this administration get? Never mind. I really don’t want to know.
Soldiers building wall separating Sunnis, Shiites
Regards,
Sho…erm, me.[/off-topic or maybe not]
There was some interesting news awhile ago, I don’t think anyone mentioned it in this thread yet – remember that “as the Iraqis stand up we’ll stand down” idea? Yeah, we’re not doing that anymore so much.