A Foreign Policy, Falling Apart (washingtonpost.com): "Contrary to the Bush administration's stated and implied promises -- 'we will be greeted as liberators' was the vice president's famous version -- we did not achieve a relatively low-cost triumph in Iraq. Instead we have a crisis of still-growing dimensions. Our occupation policy has changed as often as the color of Madonna's hair. Ominously, as became clear with last week's assassination of Iraqi Governing Council president Izzedin Salim, we cannot even protect the Iraqis who have agreed to work with us.
The war has damaged the good name of the United States in every corner of the globe, has cost unanticipated scores of billions (all of it borrowed) and now threatens long-term damage to our Army and National Guard. War has already disfigured the 3,500 American families whose sons and daughters have been killed or seriously wounded in Iraq, and countless Iraqi families as well.
The United States gets itself into this kind of trouble when it turns away from that most fundamental of American values, pragmatism. The Bush administration's initial reaction to the first attacks on U.S. soil since the War of 1812 was highly pragmatic. It identified the source of the attack and went after it forcefully, with the country's and the world's enthus"

Richard M. Nixon won the presidency in 1968. His vanity and that of his principal aide, Henry A. Kissinger, prevented an early end to the war. They insisted on a "decent interval" before acknowledging defeat in Vietnam. It took seven more years, and tens of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives, to bring the war to an end.