There's a very good article in the October Atlantic
which talks about the very serious and damaging mis-steps that the current administration has taken, with a fairly in-depth look at 2002.
On the quagmire question, there are two answers, and really neither one is entirely based on the time frame of US involvement. It's really based on the kinds of conditions that are found there before and after. If Iraq descends into warlordism and criminal capitalism (ie- organised crime runs the economy) then the US will have been responsible for creating a quagmire for the Iraqi people, regardless if the US spends one month or ten years there themselves. The jury's still out on that. In the meantime, the current situation looks like a quagmire in the immediate sense: low intensity conflict, local insurgency, slow but steady casualty rate (and the advances in med tech over the last fifteen years wrt trauma have kept the death rate a lot lower than it would have been in conflicts past), nearly no reliable way to tell the insurgent from the non-combatants (outside gender and age) and certainly no easy way, and being stuck between a rock and a hard place both politically and legally.
Under international law, the US is an occupying power and has certain legal obligations to the people of Iraq. Furthermore, if they cut and run and Iraq descends into chaos, nobody's going to believe anything they say for a generation. Legally, the US can't leave, and the political price for the US makes it very undesirable. OTOH, you're stuck in a conflict that certainly has all the pieces in place to be a quagmire. How to fix it?
There is a very real possibility that it can't be fixed. According to the article I read in the Atlantic, some career military types think Iraq would require two million soldiers there to be able to reliably secure and pacify the place, clean out both the fundie and criminal violent elements, and provide the kind of environment that could actually lead to decent elections and a real democratic government with no question as to its legitimacy.
This is the real shame of the missed opportunities in Afghanistan. The real truth is that the kind of project that the admin claims they're engaged in Iraq would have been a lot cheaper in both blood and treasure in Afghanistan, and would furthermore have made the current attempt in Iraq cheaper as well as the US would have been seen to be doing it for no reason other than security in Afghanistan. Simply put, Afghanistan is as poor as dirt, has no real wealth, and if the US had done the job right it would have been seen as being both self-interested and altruistic: self interested because of cleaning up the elements that attacked it, and altruistic because there would be no sense of collective punishment and because the motivation couldn't possibly have been driven by access to resources.
The whole thing is a huge mess. I think you're right when you say Kerry can't wave a magic wand to make it go away. However, I don't think you realise how much more intransigent the Rest of the West is going to become with the US if GWB wins again. Outside the US, he's viewed as a dangerous dishonest sociopathic clown. This in turn can create more problems as that animosity will make it harder for the US to get even a neutral result out of the current mess, let alone a good one.
--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca] [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------
