At that point I suspect Bolton will develop a sudden desire to spare the country and the president a divisive confirmation debate. The whip marks will be barely visible.

I'm not disagreeing, but if the Administration is going to coerce Bolton into bolting, why did Bush come out so strongly in support of him just days ago? Was it a stupid move by people who, once they say something's going to go one way, can't imagine it going another (a la Iraq), or just setting things up so Bush can maintain plausible deniability and save face?

• Rumsfeld's eagerness to use Iraq as a test bed for his transformation of the military was a disaster. While the US handled stage one capably, his indifferent to disorder set the stage for stage two.



• Leaving open the ammo dumps set the bed for the resistance. The Iraqi resistance is the most lavishly equipped in history. Every unit well armed with modern weapons.



• Poor planning left the US without their Third World auxillary armies to provide basic security. Without the large Pakistani and Nigerian units to patrol towns and provide basic area denial, US units have had to do two jobs, security and quick reaction.



• Disbanding the Army set the stage for the resistance to have trained people running it. These men didn't learn war from textbooks. The senior folks learned in combat and passed those lessons down



• US forces have adapted to tactics only to have those tactics shift.



• The Iraqis have minimized the use of helicopter units and limited them to observation and attack.



• The Iraqi resistance has also limited the use of the roadnet. Without convoys, resupply is impposible. This control is so dominant that US units now get some supplies by air.



• They have also thoroughly penetrated US assets in Iraq. No Iraqi unit can move without the guerrilas eventually finding out.



• US units are unable to leave their bases except on patrol. During the Vietnam War, Americans could frequent bars and live in the cities. No American can live in Iraq without security at the risk of kidnapping and death.



• The lack of infantry leaves the US unable to sustain military successes when they do occur. The scarest military resource is not armor, but trained combat infantry. Sure, you can send artillerymen out on patrol and get tankers on foot. But infantry is irreplacable for guerrilla warfare.
  
  Every day, US forces go out, take casualities and go back to their bases, trying to survive yet another attack that night. The US, in two years, have lost lives and material, but gained little. There is not one area the US can say that guerrillas cannot operate. And that is the most important fact. After two years and 1500 dead, the guerrillas control the highway to the airport, Baghdad's main drags and the country's highways.
  
  This is not winning.

I've got nothing to add, and so what that this is pretty much the exact same post that dKos put up about it -- this is important stuff, and the more it gets around, the better. And don't just read the conclusions I've presented here, look at the entire piece to see the evidence he gives to support them.

Gilliard was one of the more perceptive commentators prior to the war (despite that I occasionally disagreed with him), and he shows here the same ability to see things clearly.

Postscript: The real question here is not if we're winning in Iraq, the real question is how does an accurate assessment of the state of play (whatever it may be at the moment) get through to the American public, when the media either can't or won't report it (or both), the right-wing media apparatus is in full-scale denial, and the lefty blogosphere and other media outlets, either liberal (Air America) or objective (Frontline), have a very limited impact?

The very sad answer is that it's probably going to take a straight-forward large-scale disaster that cannot be ignored by the media to shock the public out of its torpor and shake them into the realization that things are in very bad shape.

In other words, more Americans will die.

                     Readability Results
 
Summary                                           Value

Total sentences                                    511 
Total words                                     10,653 
Average words per Sentence                          20.85 
Words with 1 Syllable                            6,918 
Words with 2 Syllables                           2,037 
Words with 3 Syllables                           1,150 
Words with 4 or more Syllables                     548 
Percentage of word with three or more syllables     15.94% 
Average Syllables per Word                           1.56 
Gunning Fog Index                                   14.71 
Flesch Reading Ease                                 53.58 
Flesch-Kincaid Grade                                10.97

According to the site's interpretation information:

• "[The] Gunning-Fog index ... is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content will be to your visitors. Results over seventeen are reported as seventeen, where seventeen is considered post-graduate level." Fourteen is about the level of the Times (of London) or the Guardian, and 15-20 is "Academic papers" -- my score was 14.71.



• Flesch Reading Ease "is an index number that rates the text on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. Authors are encouraged to aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70." My score was 53.58.



• "[The] Flesch-Kincaid grade level ... is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. Negative results are reported as zero, and numbers over twelve are reported as twelve." I scored at 10.97

[Via Kevin Drum]

Update: I finally realized that the totals didn't add up to 100% and re-took the test -- I must have inadvertantly left out one question. Also, I answered one question (about the topping on a cake) incorrectly, so my new result is:

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

35% Yankee

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Dixie

0% Midwestern

Update: Transcription error corrected.

There would be no state funeral for Franklin Roosevelt. He had insisted it would be inappropriate with American boys dying in distant lands. Instead, th caisson was borne slowly through the streets of the nation;s capital to he White House, a time for Americans to reflect on what they had lost.

Contrast that to this summary of the high honors, including a state funeral, given to Ronald Reagan while American troops were fighting the insurgency in Iraq -- Reagan, a President who won a war against a tiny Caribbean island, and started us on the path to destroying the legacy of FDR and moving us back to the Gilded Age of robber barons and vast economic inequality.

Earlier in the program, one of FDR's worst moral failings, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII was discussed. Reagan, of course, was the President who finally apologized for that, endorsing an official statement which blamed the decision it on race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of politica leadership. One wonders if Reagan would have signed it that document if the President at fault had been a Republican and not a Democrat -- but, of course, if it was something to do with one of those "Democrat wars" (in Bob Dole's infelicitous phrase).

Scenario - A change of 59,300 votes (0.048% of national total) from Bush to Kerry in one state results in a victory for Kerry.

Ohio - 59,300 votes (1.05%).


Scenario - a change of 18,776 votes (0.015% of national total) in three states between Bush and Kerry results in no electoral majority. The election would have been decided by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Iowa - 5,030 votes (0.33% from Bush to Kerry); New Mexico - 2,995 votes (0.40% from Bush to Kerry); and Nevada - 10,751 votes (1.30% from Bush to Kerry).


Scenario - A change of 70,023 votes (0.057% of national total) between Bush and Kerry in three states results in no electoral majority. The election would have been decided by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Wisconsin - 5,693 votes (0.19%) from Kerry to Bush, Iowa - 5,030 votes (0.33%) from Bush to Kerry, and Ohio - 59,300 votes (1.05%) from Bush to Kerry.

[Emphasis added and text re-formatted -- Ed]

Of course, throwing the election into the House would almost certainly have resulted in a Bush win, but the real point is that this election was remarkably close -- a change of just 1.24% of the vote would have resulted in Kerry winning the popular vote, but more remarkable is Leip's first scenario, where a change of just 60,000 votes, less than one half of 1/10 of a percent of the total national vote swings the election.

As I've written before, Bush's margin of victory was the smallest for any full-term President seeking re-election since 1892.