The numbers game in Iraq

■"Choose: More Troops In Iraq Will (Help) (Hurt): At home, calls for an exit strategy. In Iraq, calls for more combat power," by John F. Burns, New York Times, 19 June 2005, p. WK1.

■"Marines See Signs Iraq Rebels Are Battling Foreign Fighters: Insurgents may resent Jihadist violence against civilians," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 21 June 2005, p. A6.

We wanted Iraq bad and we got it bad. We opted for the fastest sort of Leviathan war (smart choice), but then turned cheapskates on the SysAdmin effort, and we continue to argue the wrong debate: it ain't about who "lost" the war (it was won, decisively), but about who bungled the peace and let the insurgency become so destructive. Back home plenty of politicians want an exit strategy (Powell Doctrine rearing its non-strategic head), so we can get out of Dodge as fast as possible, presumably to schedule our return date with greater accuracy. But the SysAdmin commanders in the field, who simultaneously battle a die-hard insurgency while trying to nation-build, clearly want more boots on the ground. Having alienated so much of the world in the run-up to the war, the Bush administration is reduced to "staying-the-course" pronouncements that spell q-u-a-g-m-i-r-e to many American parents of soldiers in southwest Asia right now.

Frankly, the best news coming out of Iraq right now is the rising frequency of red-on-red fire, meaning indigenous insurgents battling foreign fighters. If the two sides cannot stay together, then the legitimacy of the U.S.-led SysAdmin force presence is already gaining significant ground. Ideally, we become part of the country's natural immune system and it's the foreign jihadis that attract the most attention. When our security becomes their security, the SysAdmin effort begins to succeed for real.

Instead of trying to prove that we fought the war correctly, we should instead be focusing on demonstrating our awareness that the SysAdmin function is necessarily a multilateral affair that requires a region-heavy effort to reintegrate the country in question back into the international fold, otherwise we're just creating another Israel: a pilot program surrounded by a plethora of failed regimes (and yeah, I consider most Arab state-heavy regimes to be essentially "failed," as in, they "fail" to get their populations connected up to the global economy, much less prepare them for such a competitive environment).