How Do We Win in Iraq?

The real question is how we keep a pullout from looking like a surrender.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Sept. 9, 2005, at 3:25 AM PT

How do we win in Iraq—or at least get out of there without triggering catastrophe, handing a victory to the most radical insurgents, and possibly destabilizing the Middle East?

This is the question of the moment, among the war's supporters and critics alike. Blogs, op-ed pages, and brow-furrowing journals are filled with plans, some laid out in exacting detail, for eking some measure of success from this tragic venture. But all of them evade a basic reality about Iraq these days—that the United States is no longer in control. President George W. Bush could follow the best of these plans, or devise a better one, and it wouldn't make much difference, because there's nothing to suggest that the Iraqis would go along.