“Man Up”

A reader vents:

What is up with your recent post, "It could get worse dept"? A ridiculous tirade. I can easily think of "another likely path": we’re going to withdraw to Kurdistan.  From there we can still try to guide the civil war to a quick finish by diplomacy and force projection if need be. And who knows. Maybe we can still negotiate a positive outcome.

Strategy aside, you need to stop with the depressing and defeatist attitude or I’m not reading your blog anymore. You supported this war.  Man up and start talking about solutions, instead of entertaining different scenarios about how we could maximize our losses.  You never should have assumed war would be predictable and that this would be easy.

I never believed it would be easy but I didn’t believe the Bush team would ever have been this reckless or incompetent. I’ve offered several constructive thoughts: a big ramp-up of forces, a redployment to Kurdistan, or complete withdrawal. The latter two are compatible. We could withdraw to Kurdistan while threatening to leave altogether, and leverage the chaos to get Iran to cooperate. I’m just leery of taking sides in a sectarian civil war, and gloomy about the capacity of this administration to manage any of this halfway competently. At this point, more optimism is unwarranted.