ARTICLE: "McCain Calls War 'Necessary and Just,'," by Michael D. Shear, Washington Post, 12 April 2007, p. A1.

Is just plain sad.

It's like the guy is working out some demons from another life.

I think the war was "necessary and just."

I also think the way we've screwed up the peace is unnecessary and unjust--to both our troops and Iraq.

We're locking ourselves into self-destructively small boxes with this language.

We won the war.

We've struggled to segue that clear victory (Saddam's regime is gone) into a stable peace that makes our pull-back from combat serve as something other than the expected trigger for further--and perhaps expanded--mass violence.

We have that definition in Kurdistan. Our combat troops should increasingly pull back to that venue.

We are close enough on the Shiite south, and no, Iran's not gonna to run the place any more or less depending on what we do now. Iran will have influence there, but Iraq's Shiites didn't wait so long for this moment of autonomy to hand it over to the Iranians. In the end, a relatively free and functioning Shiite Iraq will "ruin" Iran more than vice versa.

The Sunni-based insurgency, plus al Qaeda Iraq remain as serious-but-getting-somewhat-better-with-the-surge problems in Sunni Iraq and around Baghdad. These sources of instability both regularly cross swords with Shiite militias, which we're also working in the surge.

Those problems, no matter how the surge goes, I just don't see America owning forever, because I don't see trying to do so as being a particularly realistic or winning strategy. So long as we're there, we remain everyone's target, and that just delays the fight (Sunni v. Shiia, both straight-up and as proxies for regional wannabees Saudi Arabia and Iran) that needs to happen and ultimately will happen anyway, largely because Iraq the central government can't/won't control it and because we can't stop it with the troops we are willing to commit.

Can we quiet Iraq with the surge? Somewhat. Can we make it last? Doubtful.

If Bush hadn't done so poorly in attracting allies--both old and new--for the postwar, we might have been able to obviate that fight, but this administration did do poorly there, creating the inescapable dynamic we now need to rethink.

I mean, what's the finishing line we're defining now?

Strategically speaking, we truly don't have a dog in that Sunni-Shiia fight, as we proved for years during the Iran-Iraq war (we supported Saddam, but--quite frankly--we were cool with both sides losing as they did). I mean, it doesn't really benefit us particularly to choose sides. Frankly, if forced to choose I go with the Shiia, partly out of guilt (from post-Desert Storm) and partly out of revulsion that I'd otherwise be choosing to align myself with al Qaeda (Sy Hersh's point).

But McCain seems to have lost all such perspective and I'm not sure anymore what "war" he sees us winning or losing.