The Republicans have decided that they need to tell the public that they will stay the course in Iraq forever with a resolution saying as much. They are trying to force the Democrats to sign it as a political stunt. But they are wrong on both accounts. The current course is wrong, and I don't think the Democrats will mind saying so.
What we are doing right now is treating everyone who shoots at or around us like Al Qaeda. That's crazy because what motivates each of these fighters is different from person to person, and group to group. And if what you want is an end to violence then you need to figure out why they are fighting against you and fix that, not just fight back. Should we kill the kid who just wants to take a pot shot at us because we killed his mom or his dad? Is he an Al Qaeda terrorist? No on both counts. What about the guy who just wants us out of Iraq? What about the guy who is fighting for sectarian reasons? Only a very small portion are foreign fighters there to fight us, so why treat everyone like foreign terrorists.
It may sound weak but if you listen to the people directly involved in the Vietnam conflict, years on they tell us that they misunderstood the enemy. And it was that misunderstanding that caused us to lose the war. We can't fight our way out of this. Pundits on the right, like Ann Coulter, say that we should bomb the country randomly. That's nuts of course, but still, we can't kill our way out of this. To pacify the country we need to understand the motivations of the combatants, and deal with their problems.
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