Don't be surprised, the true believers still don't get it?

William Kristol holds forth on the need to stay the course and "win" Iraq. Trouble is that he needs a more persuasive concept of winning. The army is being stretched to its limits and, other than a momentary surge of manpower (e.g., December 2005 to provide cover for the elections), the U.S. military is about at its limit in terms of deployable. As I have written here several times, there is lots, I repeat lots, of high level worry that the army will not have the capacity to meet a serious challenge elsewhere. This is why you hear the generals talking about troop reductions in Iraq next year. So if Kristol thinks we should throw more troops at the insurgency in order to "win" he doesn't get it at all. Moreover, more troops means more targets, more animosity, and more costs.
Perhaps Kristol thinks that creating an Iraqi democracy is "winning" but we are far from creating even a stable government.
The fact is that the U.S. has overreached. Without debating the war again, even opponents have to concede that leaving Iraq a chaotic, violence spewing country is not very smart, but that means we need to get realistic about the prospects for success and about our considerable structural limitations. It also means that we should be putting a lot more time into thinking about the geopolitics of Iraq, and what we need to do find overlapping interests with regional powers, including Syria and Iran. We are not a in happy place.
The following excerpt from the Kristol editorial includes, as you will see, a hard jab at Rumsfeld who seems to still enjoys GB's confidence.
Bush v. Rumsfeld:

The president knows we have to win this war. If some of his subordinates are
trying to find ways to escape from it, he needs to assert control over them,
overrule them, or replace them. Having corrected the silly effort by some of his
advisers to say the war on terror is not fundamentally a war, he now has to deal
with the more serious effort, emanating primarily from the civilian leadership
in the Pentagon, to find an excuse not to pursue victory in Iraq. For if Iraq is
the central front in the war on terror, we need to win there. And to win, the
president needs a defense secretary who is willing to fight, and able to win.

Incidentally, top Iraqi and U.S. officials are now working out a series of benchmarks ("Iraqization" will necessarily evoke memories of Vietnamization that did not work out so well) by which to gauge when U.S. troops may be incrementally withdrawn. The key criteria all turn on security, of course, so much depends on the insurgents capacity and will to persist. Co-opting segments of the insurgency into the governing process remains a key imperative, in my view.