So you'd think it would have been intelligently designed, then.

An interesting article from the New Yorker's Seymour Hersch on the prosecution of the war in Iraq, and the strategies for and likelihood of a potential draw-down in US troops. Most interesting in this article is the description of the religious fervor that Bush brought to the mission:
Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”
I have nothing against religion or religious people, and it pains me to even have to include that disclaimer, patronizing as it sounds. But I become highly alarmed when our foreign policy, especially with regard to military matters, starts being based on messages from god. The problem becomes larger when blind faith, in god, politicians, parties or policies, interferes with a constructive discussion on how the war is going, and what should be done to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. We're all jihadis in the end.

The article includes an interesting look at how a draw-down in American troops might proceed, and what kind of residual American power might remain to bolster the rickety and mostly incompetent Iraqi forces that would remain. The inevitable answer is, of course, the exceedingly blunt tool of air power. And air power would risk becoming both blunt and very probably maliciously misdirected should target selection be turned over to the Iraqi goverment, as is currently being discussed:

Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, who has written widely on American airpower, and who taught for three years at the Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama, predicted that the air war “will get very ugly” if targeting is turned over to the Iraqis. This would be especially true, he said, if the Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and Marines have done—plowing through Sunni strongholds on search-and-destroy missions. “If we encourage the Iraqis to clear and hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the insurgents from penetrating the cleared areas, it could be useful,” Pape said. “The risk is that we will encourage the Iraqis to do search-and-destroy, and they would be less judicious about using airpower—and the violence would go up. More civilians will be killed, which means more insurgents will be created.”

Even American bombing on behalf of an improved, well-trained Iraqi Army would not necessarily be any more successful against the insurgency. “It’s not going to work,” said Andrew Brookes, the former director of airpower studies at the Royal Air Force’s advanced staff college, who is now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London. “Can you put a lid on the insurgency with bombing?” Brookes said. “No. You can concentrate in one area, but the guys will spring up in another town.” The inevitable reliance on Iraqi ground troops’ targeting would also create conflicts. “I don’t see your guys dancing to the tune of someone else,” Brookes said. He added that he and many other experts “don’t believe that airpower is a solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground with airpower didn’t work in Vietnam, did it?”

There are interesting times ahead. It's a worth a listen to the installment of NPR's "This American Life" entitled "What's in a Number?" (1 hour RealAudio file), which discusses both the medical journal Lancet's study (link to an article in The Economist) estimating Iraqi casualties and the criteria employed by the Pentagon to selec targets for bombardment in Iraq. If you wanted to know what constitutes "acceptable civilian casualties" for an American attack, this will illuminate you. It also debunks, as does article from The Economist, some of the criticism of that study which was founded on poor understanding of statistics.

I also want to recommend a book I am reading, Anthony Shadid's "Night draws near: Iraq's people in the shadow of America's war". Shadid, a Pulitzer-winning Washington Post journalist, does a fantastic job of humanizing an Iraqi people so often reduced to stereotypes or statistics by American coverage and of explaining the cultural and historical factors and mistakes that essentially doomed the American occupation from the start.

Bonus pop-culture quiz: Who was on a mission from god in 1980? No Google; this is an easy one.