I got flack from Mike last year about a post in which I wrote that President Bush is quite stupid, uninterested in the world around him, and actively lied to the American people about the Iraq War. In a follow-up post, I wrote, "It's not that I disagree with the way the president has handled this war. It's that I disagree with the war itself; there is no "good" way to operate this war, since it shouldn't have happened to begin with." Today, Joshua Michah Marshall of Talking Points Memo explains Harry Reid's "war is lost" comment this way:

Frankly, the whole question is stupid. Or at least it's a very stilted way of understanding what's happening, geared to guarantee President Bush's goal of staying in Iraq forever. A more realistic description is President Bush's long twilight struggle to see just how far he can go into one brown paper bag.

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It's a huge distortion to say that this means the war was 'lost'. It just means what the war supporters said would happen didn't happen. The premise was bogus. Like I said at the outset, the whole exercise is like getting trapped in a brown paper bag. You can keep going into the bag and into the bag and into the bag and never get out or change anything. Or you can just turn around and walk out of the bag.

To say the war is "lost" would be to say that it had a path from which it strayed. This is not the issue, as the war never had a path that was good and just, anyway.