Not Encouraging
Consider the source. This is not Krugman, Dionne or (fill in the name of your least favorite liberal columnist here). This is the Defense Science Board. All W's protestations of progress against the backdrop of continued violence, the calls for delay of the election in Iraq, and the sadly mishandled post-war planning and execution are further evidence of his willing blindness or innate delusionary tendencies - I don't know which.

I'd like to temper the criticism of the "execution" of the post-war situation because much of it was a fait d'acompli (pardon my French, "Feedom Fries" eaters). The fine men and women of our armed forces are doing an incredible job despite the terrible pre-war decisions made in DC.

Had W. decided to follow the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force (reflected in by Shinseki's initial troop estimates) instead of trying to get a "two-fer" - (1) the neo-con vision of the U.S. as democracy messiah for the mid-east, and (2) the hope of "demonstrating" the Rumsfeld vision of "transformation" of the military forces by skimping on troops and relying on technology and speed, much of the "execution" would likely have gone much better. The initial stages of the aftermath gave the insurgent terrorists the momentum and encouragement. These status of these "visions" he sought remains an open question.

Even if Iraq remains one country - its really at least three - and elects a government accepted by a majority of Iraqis, it still may be a theocracy that is hostile to U.S. interests. If that's so, how was this worth over a thousand US military lives and hundreds of US billion$?

When did "conservatives" become such bleeding hearts, touting their ability to free the world of dictators? I thought conservatives recognized that the US military exists to serve US interests in a strict interpretationists' sense. Silly me. They must be planning to go free most of Africa, not to mention ridding the world of Kim Jong-Il. Wouldn't THAT be a great idea? NO........ Obviously we don't have the troops (or stomach in the sense of political will) for that. Only for wars of convenience and against far lesser foes.

W. sought to avoid his father's problem with the "vision thing". Vision without substantiation is hallucination. Where this ends up remains to be seen, but clearly it didn't have to happen this way. We could have waited out the dying regime - if the intel had not been pumped up on WMD. And even if the decision to go to war was irreversible, we could have done it (the democracy messiah thing) better by not trying to do it on the cheap. That is, if it turns out to be do-able at all. Open question.