In his column today

In his column today Nick Kristof argues that for all the mistakes President Bush made getting us into Iraq — mistakes both of omission and commission, incompetence and bad-faith — that now we have no choice but to stay, and to pay what it takes to get the job done right. “I believe that President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq,” Kristof writes in conclusion, “but he’s right about staying there.”

I agree, so far as it goes. But I think the sentiment expressed misses the point.

I certainly don’t think we should pull out of Iraq. More importantly, I don’t know many of what I’d call mainstream foreign policy voices who think we should pull out of Iraq any time in the near future. (No, Dennis Kucinich doesn’t count.) I know the president would like to conjure up opponents who favor an immediate pull-out from Iraq because shadow-boxing with them would make for good politics. But I really don’t know quite who Kristof is arguing against.

As I said, I think Kristof has it a bit wrong.

The question is not whether we should pull out immediately, nor is it precisely how long we’ll need to stay, nor even the precise sums of money we should be willing to expend. The question is how to make a success — or at least not a failure — of the situation we’re currently in.

And if our task is to figure out how to find our way to success, then it makes a lot of sense to look skeptically at the roadmap to success being charted by those who got us into the mess in the first place.