That post you linked to was from March 2006 and has H.L. Monkey's name on it, not mine. I'm sure I've written something critical of the democracy project in Iraq somewhere, though I would certainly share the sentiments in that post.

... and I just happened to spend the last hour listening to a lecture from Thomas Ricks, senior military correspondent for the Washington Post, who authored the book "Fiasco" about the early part of the Iraq war and now has a follow-up book called about the surge called "The Gamble." I hope before going into "liberal Washington Post" blahblahblahs you'll take a look at his credentials. This is a guy very steeped in how the military works and how war works, and his earlier book is being taught in officer schools. He's not some peacenik to be dismissed as an America-hater.

He comes to much the same conclusion you do, actually, Jim: He thinks America has an obligation to maintain a substantial combat presence in Iraq. But his way of arriving at that conclusion -- based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Petraeus, Crocker, people in Washington and people in Iraq -- is substantially less cheery than yours.

Put it this way: We haven't won in Iraq. Given his characterization of the situation, I don't think you could charitably say we're winning. What we've done, he suggests, is delay a genocidal reckoning. And the only way to continue to delay that genocidal reckoning, he said, is to maintain our military presence in Iraq.

I didn't take notes, so I'm reconstructing from memory, but his case was roughly as follows:

• The best thing that can be said for the initial invasion of Iraq is that Saddam was removed from power. But the U.S. may have merely cleared an old, increasingly toothless dictator off the scene to make way for somebody younger and still quite mean.

• The surge improved security, a good thing. But it didn't result in the resolution of any major political questions before the Iraqi people. On its own terms, it failed. At best, it "kicked the can down the road" on those issues.

• Despite the hallelujahs of Krauthammer, et al, the provincial elections don't necessarily mean what you think they mean. Why? Well, remember those purple fingers? They were celebrated at the time as a sign of stability -- that the U.S. was winning -- only to be followed by the insane levels of civil war violence a few months later. Elections, at this nascent stage of Iraqi governance, are just the beginning of the conversation about divvying up power -- not the end.

• Because the 2 million people who have left Iraq since the war began comprised much of the country's middle class -- lawyers, doctors, teachers and other intellectuals; the "glue" of the country -- the people left to settle that conversation are "men of the gun" who see politics as a zero-sum game: I've got power and you're dead.

• The result of all this is that there are no good options left to the U.S. in Iraq. It'd be nice to leave, but that would probably spark a genocidal civil war that would embroil the Turks against the Kurds, the Iranians in support of the Shiites and the Saudis in support of the Sunnis. So we can't, morally, leave. We'll be there for years, decades even. And not in the postwar Korea or Germany sense; as long as we have troops in Iraq, Ricks said, they will be in some form of combat.

• In any event, Ricks said, he'd be willing to bet money -- and his reputation -- that Iraq never becomes a stable, democratic ally of the United States. The dream of conservatives, their last hope of salvaging something that is meaningfully a "victory" in Iraq, is simply unlikely.

This was extremely sobering stuff.