If Iraq is, as Ted Kennedy managed to bellow this week, “George Bush’s Vietnam”, then I have a simple response, “there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

One of the biggest problems of modern war is the twenty-four hour news cycle. The media has a lot of time and space to fill and, resultantly, they manage to blow everything out of proportion and distort everyone’s view of events. The panic over Iraq isn’t reflective of how things are going on the ground over there; it’s a reflection of how things are going on the air over here.

People are often panicked and convinced that events are spinning out of control without rational reason to believe so. Of course things are hard in Iraq. But things are hard in every conflict and post-conflict situation. Can you imagine if the modern media had been around in the terrible mass wars of the last two centuries? Can you imagine what Crossfire would have been like after a Battle, as was routine in the Civil War, where ten thousand people died?

Things went wrong in Iraq, yes. But that’s the way of war. The only people who, before the war, promised that everything in Iraq would go perfectly were either lying for political reasons or stupid. Things haven’t gone perfectly, no. But things have gone as well as can be expected.

There’s a clear exit strategy underway for Iraq. At the end of this month the elections are going to be held. All signs are that they’re going to go well or, at least, well enough for our purposes. After the elections are over, the number of US forces will begin to be reduced and more and more security duties will be turned over to Iraqi forces.

A major US force (if I were to guess, I’d say a force of about the same size as that stationed in Korea over the last decade or, in other words, a full Division plus supporting elements and facilities for the rapid deployment of additional units) will remain in Iraq for the long haul. If I were a betting man, I’d guess that some American soldiers will be stationed in Iraq for decades. But these forces won’t conduct day-to-day policing operations. Instead, they’ll remain in their bases and stand at the ready to strike terrorist bases or, in the last ditch, defend the Iraqi government from overthrow.

I, for one, don’t expect the Iraqi government to be overturned by the terrorists. No one should. If you read beneath the hysteria in the media the overriding theme of recent months is the impotence of the so-called “resistance” as a resistance movement. There’s no sign of any sort of revolution, nor do the “insurgents” appear to command any forces capable of mounting any sort of major rebellion. They’re able to kill, but not to fight.

Now, they’re going to go on killing for quite sometime. I’m well aware of that. They’ll attempt attacks on American forces in their bases but, for the most part, US forces will prove to be secure. They’ll continue to attack Iraqi security forces, but even that can’t go on forever.

Iraq is a clear-cut victory for the United States. It was harder than expected, but I see no reason not to now be optimistic about the future of the country. Some are predicting a ‘civil war’, but they’ve been doing that for two years. If there were to be one, it wouldn’t be much of one. The Shiites and the Kurds have no real interest in fighting, so it would be a Sunni-Shiite conflict. The Shiites are better organized than the Sunnis, plus they massively outnumber them.

I expect to see the first signs of the implementation of a US exit strategy within months of the elections (assuming that things aren’t, as they tend to be, derailed by events). As part of this strategy, I suspect that we’ll see some sort of strike against Syria in retaliation for Syrian support for the insurgency.

I view such a strike as integral to the transition into the new phase of operations in Iraq. By striking Syria, the United States would demonstrate its willingness to use force in defense of Iraq and, additionally, demonstrate the continuing vitality of American military power.

As a side note: I’m constantly amazed by people’s efforts to stick Donald Rumsfeld with what did go wrong in Iraq. To put it simply: the problems of the insurgency and everything that’s resulted it are as far from being the fault of Don Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense as it humanly possible.

The Secretary had an exit strategy from the beginning. March in. Change regime. March out. Basically, if he’d had his way, he’d have appointed an interim government and then sent them out on their own, with US forces remaining on hand to respond to any mess. If the result was to be a civil war then, well, “freedom is messy.” No one (other than a few foreign policy professionals) in America would have cared. With careful US support, the chosen faction would have emerged from the resultant chaos as the winner.

That’s the reason why there was no Rumsfeld “exit strategy.” That’s the reason he didn’t send more troops. He didn’t expect to stay.

What happened next is the fault of the Paul Bremer, the State Department, and the President. Basically, having given the hawkish faction their way in invading Iraq, President Bush yielded to those (mostly at State, in the CIA and elsewhere) who sought to repeat the MacArthur regency in Iraq, with Bremer playing the role of General MacArthur.

That was a bad idea, if an understandable one. We forget now but, after all of the predictions of disaster before the war, there was an initial post-war boost of jubilation. Somewhere along the way, the mission in Iraq was transformed from regime change to nation building. There was a subtle process of mission creep.

It began with the looting. People afterwards complained that US troops didn’t stop the post-overthrow looting. I suspect that was intentional. My suspicion is that Rummy resisted ordering US troops to do so because he didn’t want American soldiers assigned to police Baghdad’s streets.

There were two ways of doing Iraq quickly and successfully. The first, the Rumsfeld way, would have been a quick in-and-out which would have served most American interested, admittedly at the expense of Iraqi lives and standards of living. The second, the British model, would have been a full-on clamp down, followed by an extended period of American rule.

Bremer and State, with the desire to play the swaggering imperialist but not the ability, tried some sort of awful hybrid-approach which sucked the US into Iraq’s internal problems without offering an obvious way out. They wanted the fun of playing imperial proconsul, but they didn’t want to accept the unpleasant duties which all good British colonial administrators had to perform. The result was chaos.

But, in the end, that’s simply the reality of war. It was a bad idea to go for a full-on occupation and a worse idea not to use the force necessary to enforce it. People always talk about troop numbers. That’s pure nonsense. The problem was never troops numbers, but the force used by the troops. Britain ruled India with tens of thousands of soldiers and a few thousand administrators. They did it through their political savvy and their willingness to use frank and brutal force where called for. In 1920-21 a much smaller British force in Iraq faced what the United States never did: a united national uprising, and they managed to put it down fairly quickly.

I don’t mean to condemn them for their mistakes: in war everyone makes errors. I simply point them out by way of explanation for what went wrong. But, even with that, things hardly turned out as badly as they’ve been portrayed.

To begin: virtually none of the predictions of the anti-war left came true. The left loves to talk about weapons of mass destruction. Fine, let them. But I’d simply point out that virtually none of what they worried about came to pass. There was no massive environmental disaster. The war didn’t result in massive unrest in the Moslem world and the overthrow of ‘moderate’ Islamic governments. There was no humanitarian disaster in Iraq. Baghdad didn’t turn into the new Stalingrad.

The only pre-war anti-war argument which continues to be mentioned is the idea that a war in Iraq would be a ‘distraction’ from the Global War on Terrorism. I don’t believe that to be true at all. It’s only true in the sense that some falsely wish to portray the “War on Terrorism” as “the War to Capture Osama Bin Laden.” While we don’t have access to al-Qaeda’s books, I’d bet good money that the majority of their resources and operatives are going into the battle in Iraq. More than that, I’d point out that, had there been no war, the obviously deadly and capable Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would be running free under the charge of Saddam Hussein.

I’d rather have followed up the invasion of Iraq by hitting Syria and Iran but, all in all, it can hardly be said that the time and effort devoted to fighting the insurgency in Iraq has been wasted.

In the end, my advice for the public on Iraq is simple and direct: calm down. Wait and see what happens. Nothing is as bad as you believe.