I talked--or taped--an interview with Hewitt for eight minutes tonight while driving to the airport (and have no idea if the spot runs tonight or not, but suspect it might), and assuming I'm not edited down to bites, I feel I got my point across.

Hugh wants to pre-emptively tag the Dems for future Sunni-v-Shia killings in the inevitable drawdown and pullback to follow. He wants a number to pin on them now in advance of Petraeus' report. The stabbed-in-the-back storyline is being pro-actively weaved.

But here's why that won't work:

Bush unnecessarily alienated the allies we needed to win the postwar early on by fielding enough troops.

Bush let the Sunni-Shia civil war unfold by waiting too long to surge the necessary numbers.

Bush THEN accelerates a fight with Iran on WMD, despite his intell community's judgment that Iran is 3-5 years away from fielding a bomb.

By doing that, and prepping the American public for military strikes with Iran, Bush not only loses popular support at home (sheer fear over a premature escalation and spreading of the war) but encourages (!!!!) Tehran to push as hard as possible in its proxy war in Iraq, so as to keep us diverted and bleed our troops. THAT Bush decision kills ours troops unnecessarily.

THAT Bush decision also encourages (!!!) Riyadh to counter in Iraq with its own effort. That effort also unnecessarily leads to American troop deaths.

Finally, Bush refuses any serious diplomatic surge to accompany the troop surge, and that means he's led America into a strategic cul-de-sac: we either preside over slo-mo ethnic cleansing, losing troops unnecessarily along the way, or we watch it go faster from the sidelines. Either way, our credibility in the region plummets. If we lose enough Americans in this idiotic pathway of Bush's stubborn creation, he'll singlehandedly kill American popular support for a long-term presence in the region. Those deaths that follow will also sit on Bush's head.

Why Bush picked this premature fight with Iran RIGHT when Tehran could harm us most in Iraq, putting the maximum number of U.S. troops at risk (and killing plenty in this process unnecessarily) is simply beyond me. It is THE strategic mistake of the entire Bush administration, and it's why all the deaths to date and to follow will sit squarely on Bush's shoulders. These were all HIS choices, despite a chorus of advice to the contrary--all along the way.

I would accept no such number of either Iraqi or American deaths. I never would have ramped up the fight prematurely with Tehran. I would have done it wit North Korea, but not Iran. I would have made the deals necessary to make Iraq work. I would not abandon one war without finishing it to prematurely ramp up another one with Iran.

If you want to counter by saying the meddling by Iran and Saudi Arabia (i.e., support to co-religionists) matters little, then fine. But it's hard to deny that their roles--along with Iran proxy Syria--could have been large in the stabilization of Iraq, something we've not really forced and/or negotiated from them. Absent attaining a powerful quorum of outside powers to force Iraq's stabilization in a huge show of force, we were ALWAYS slated to accommodate both Riyadh and Tehran on Iraq, and if you say balancing those two is that hard, then I think you overestimate the Saudis and underestimate the Iranians--and clearly we collectively misunderestimated Bush by re-electing him in 2004, when signs of his administration's lack of strategic imagination were already appearing.

Ed. Hugh spoke to Tom about Bosnia done backwards is still a model, just with more real-time anguish but for some reason linked the wrong post in his own post