FT: Bush Plan = Guaranteed Defeat

George W. Bush’s new direction in Iraq is certainly not a strategy for victory, whatever that word, which is used ever more desperately by the US president, now means ...

Right now, Mr Bush has the support of no more than one in four Americans for this so-called surge of an extra 20,000 or so troops. Very soon, as the already indecipherable ethnic and sectarian patchwork of Iraq is pulled further and even more bloodily to pieces, he will have none ...

The only feasible way forward is the approach of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission – which the new US Congress should embrace and insist on ... Mr Bush is instead threatening to expand the war ... The Iraq surge is beginning to look like the Vietnam escalation, spilling over into Iran and Syria the way that one did into Cambodia and Laos.

Mr Bush is right to argue that defeat in Iraq would be very serious. He is wrong in failing to recognise defeat is what he is staring at – and that this approach will help guarantee it.