A Perfect "Lose-Lose" Situation

If anyone knows a lost cause when he sees one, it's Henry the K. As chief foreign policy guru to Richard M. Nixon, Henry Kissinger had to steer the United States through the end days of its utter failure in Vietnam. It wasn't easy and it wasn't pretty despite the "peace with honour" packaging that fooled no one.

So, when Hank calls "quagmire" he probably knows what he's talking about and, today, he's talking plenty.

Henry Kissinger has made two fundamental pronouncements: America cannot win militarily in Iraq and Iraq isn't ready for democracy. No victory, no democracy. According to The Guardian:

"Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq's regional neighbors - including Iran - if progress is to be made in the region.

"'If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible,' he told the British Broadcasting Corp."

Kissinger didn't hold out any greater hope for democracy in Iraq, according to the L.A. Times:

"Instead of holding elections and trying to build democratic institutions from the ground up, Kissinger said, the United States should focus on more limited goals: preventing the emergence of a 'fundamentalist jihadist regime' in Baghdad and enlisting other countries to help stabilize Iraq.

"He said he would have preferred a post-invasion policy that installed a strong Iraqi leader from the military or some other institution and deferred the development of democracy until later. 'If we had done that right away, that might have been the best way to proceed,' he said.

"In Iraq, he said, elections, the centerpiece of the administration's political strategy, merely sharpened sectarian differences. 'It [was] a mistake to think that you can gain legitimacy primarily through the electoral process,' he said."