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Kevin Drum's reaction to David Ignatus' WaPo column today includes an excellent summary of the evolution over the last three years of liberal policy solutions for dealing with Iraq. I wish I could disagree with him on his conclusions, but I can't. Take a look, or read this excerpt:

A "debate" is fine, but only if there's something to debate. Should we privatize Social Security? Let's debate. Should we debate about how to fix Iraq? We could, but only if there were some plausible solutions to argue about. Unfortunately, there aren't. We don't have enough troops in Iraq to keep order and the troops we do have aren't trained properly anyway. Nobody appears to have any serious desire to change that. Politically, the sectarian split in Iraq is embedded deeply in their history and culture and is mostly beyond our ability to affect, especially after three years of mismanagement. Globally, we have virtually no influence left with either local power brokers like Iran or with our European allies.

Various luminaries in the liberal foreign policy community have been proposing Iraq policies right and left for over three years now. First, that perhaps we should have kept our focus on Afghanistan and stayed out of Iraq altogether. Then, once we were there, liberal thinkers suggested more troops, dialogue with Iran, a multilateral council to accelerate regional investment in Iraq's progress, a variety of counterinsurgency strategies, a variety of partition plans, more serious engagement in Israeli-Palestinian talks (Tony Blair practically begged for this), and on and on. Every single one of these suggestions was ignored.

Would they have made any difference? Who knows. But to blame Democrats now for not being aggressive enough in trying to trisect this angle is like blaming Gerald Ford for losing Vietnam. George Bush fought this war precisely the way he wanted, with precisely the troops he wanted, and with every single penny he asked for. He has kept Don Rumsfeld in charge despite abundant evidence that he doesn't know how to win a war like this. He has mocked liberals and the media at every turn when they suggested we might need a different approach. The result has been a disaster with no evident solution left.

One of the most frustrating things about the current debate over Iraq is that it seems most people presume there must be an option that can still provide us with a positive outcome. But life doesn't always work that way; just because we want a good option doesn't mean there actually is one. Mistakes have consequences, and sometimes one of them is a situation cannot be salvaged. I wish with all of my being that this wasn't one of those situations, but the facts as I understand them lead me to no other conclusion.

We need to accept the reality we have created. We need to embrace our reality as it is, not as we wish it could be. Only then will we find a solution that minimizes the damage created by this fiasco.

UPDATE: In an update to a post dedicated to Gen Batiste's testimony before Democratic members of Congress on Monday, Gregory Djerejian lays the problem out in much greater detail.