Welcome to Victory in Iraq, Year 4

I'm back, just in time for Year 4 of Victory in Iraq.

It's great to learn from Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld that things are going so well. A few of us were beginning to worry that things were getting a little bogged down, that the Iraqi people wanted us to leave, and that military and civilian casualties were likely to continue to mount indefinitely.

Even the former prime minister of Iraq, Ayad Allawi, was having a few doubts, saying the country is edging toward "the point of no return."

"We are losing a day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more," Allawi said on BBC's "Sunday AM" program. "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

I'm reassured now, though.

The Commander in Chief has assured Americans that his administration is pursuing a strategy "that will lead to victory in Iraq."

He should know, right? Actually, I was reassured just to find out that we had a strategy. I wonder what it is.

It's a shame the New York Times is still so negative. In a Sunday editorial, the paper said:

The last three years have shown how little our national leaders understood Iraq, and have reminded us how badly attempts at liberation from the outside have gone in the past. Given where we are now, the question of whether a botched invasion created a lost opportunity might be moot, except for one thing. The man who did the botching, Donald Rumsfeld, is still the secretary of defense...

And:

The Iraq debacle ought to serve as a humbling lesson for future generations of American leaders — although, if our leaders were capable of being humbled, they could have simply looked back to Vietnam.