MightyMach, thanks for the list of quotes, but I'm already very familiar with them. I am not one of those who believe Bush was "lying" about WMDs; I think however, by invading Iraq he primarily wanted to remake the Middle East. I'm with him on this goal. We can't kill off Islamic fundamentalism without the Middle East being transformed. The WMDs were what he believed was the best legal and political justification for the war.

That said, we can have the best ideas in the world, but we still need to execute. I can't for the life of me understand how even the most pro-war person can possibly believe that things are going well over there. Yes, we have done a great deal of building and development, lots of local elections have taken place, and a lot of good things happen every day that we don't see on the news. Not everyone hates us; to the contrary, many GIs are still being welcomed in many villages and towns. Nonetheless, no rebuilding and good will from the locals will mean anything until we control that country.

And here's the sad reality for conservatives like me who generally support Bush: we need to realize that it is not the military which made the planning blunders, but the Bush administration, which wanted to do the occupation on the cheap. It was a wild roll of the dice that things would go swimmingly, and they had no Plan B. Truly, it's appalling incompetence.

We can "stay the course" as we have been, but how does this present course bring us to victory? What's the magic number of schools or wells that will be built that will suddenly make the insurgents stop fighting? I hear talk about how things will get better in Iraq's January elections. I don't think so. We can't just keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Bush will need to fundamentally change the war plan, by for instance, moving masses of more troops there, and rather than fighting Rumsfeld's "light" war, go back to the old fashioned way of wiping out whole towns. I hate to sound brutal, but we need to fight to win. I fear that Bush is so stubborn (and this can be a helpful characteristic of his too) that he will refuse to look at failure and make adjustments accordingly.