AND I THOUGHT DISPLAYING RESOLVE WAS IMPORTANT.

AND I THOUGHT DISPLAYING RESOLVE WAS IMPORTANT. Apparently not. Henry Kissinger:

�If you mean, by �military victory,� an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don�t believe that is possible,� Mr. Kissinger told BBC News.

This is odd coming from a guy who, according to Bob Woodward, thought that "the problem in Vietnam was that we lost our will". By one reading, it could be argued that Kissinger is trying to redefine success down in order to make it easier to declare victory and leave. By another, he could be trying to salvage his reputation as a realist by jumping off of a war that's really not his. In any case, suggesting that victory is impossible can hardly be seen as a positive contribution to the problem of losing our "will", although it's nice to see that Kissinger is once again explictly blaming democracy and democratic process for defeat. It should be noted that Kissinger's somewhat incoherent position is still better than John McCain's, whose plan for a "short-term surge" is ably demolished by Yglesias.

--Robert Farley