Today’s Op-Ed by General Wesley Clark in the NYTimes.

While the Bush administration and its critics escalated the debate last week over how long our troops should stay in Iraq, I was able to see the issue through the eyes of America’s friends in the Persian Gulf region. The Arab states agree on one thing: Iran is emerging as the big winner of the American invasion, and both President Bush’s new strategy and the Democratic responses to it dangerously miss the point. It’s a devastating critique. And, unfortunately, it is correct.

While American troops have been fighting, and dying, against the Sunni rebels and foreign jihadists, the Shiite clerics in Iraq have achieved fundamental political goals: capturing oil revenues, strengthening the role of Islam in the state, and building up formidable militias that will defend their gains and advance their causes as the Americans draw down and leave. Iraq’s neighbors, then, see it evolving into a Shiite-dominated, Iranian buffer state that will strengthen Tehran’s power in the Persian Gulf just as it is seeks nuclear weapons and intensifies its rhetoric against Israel.

This is exactly correct and exposes the fraud in the “stay the course” rhetoric which is designed to sound all tough and Rambo-esque and “committed”. We have already succeeded in Iraq where Iran failed during their war, which is quite ironic when you realize that we supported and armed Saddam during the Iran/Iraq war specifically to keep Iran from getting a wider foothold and influence in the region. Now that we’ve turned on Saddam we’ve managed to sacrifice a few thousand of our own troops, our reputation, our economy, our morality and what little diplomatic influence we had under a Bush administration, to say nothing of squandering all the international goodwill that followed 9/11, doing for Iran exactly what we were trying to prevent all those years ago.

Unfortunately, Clark then follows up that spot on analysis with nonsense that ignores the basic reality of being an invader maintaining an unwanted army of occupation in a country whose citizens desperately wants us gone. We have become the targets and the Iraqis are paying the price with their lives for us being there, every day we stay. So for Clark to then make the case for us to stay, especially after he has claimed to “see the issue through the eyes of America’s friends”, makes me wonder what sort of specialized blinders he was wearing during that viewing. [emphasis mine]

We need to keep our troops in Iraq, but we need to modify the strategy far more drastically than anything President Bush called for last week.

On the military side, American and Iraqi forces must take greater control of the country’s borders, not only on the Syrian side but also in the east, on the Iranian side. The current strategy of clearing areas near Syria of insurgents and then posting Iraqi troops, backed up by mobile American units, has had success. But it needs to be expanded, especially in the heavily Shiite regions in the southeast, where there has been continuing cross-border traffic from Iran and where the loyalties of the Iraqi troops will be especially tested.

We need to deploy three or four American brigades, some 20,000 troops, with adequate aerial reconnaissance, to provide training, supervision and backup along Iraq’s several thousand miles of vulnerable border. And even then, the borders won’t be “sealed”; they’ll just be more challenging to penetrate.

Such a tactic is absurd on its face and would be a recipe for tension and conflict between the US and the shi’ite majority (to say nothing of the poor Sunnis) and provide yet more fertile ground for terrorist activity.

Getting us out, immediately, really is the only course.

It won’t create peace, it won’t be pretty (but no solution will) but it will allow the Iraqi people a fair shot at actually fighting for their own country instead of being stuck between an unwanted occupier claiming to want what’s best for them and a motivated and deadly amalgam of groups, both Iraqi and foreign, who want to use the occupation as a way to kill Americans and create even more conflict.

Removing our troops from the picture, putting them “over the horizon” as Jack Murtha recommended, takes most of the fuel from the fire and also removes any cover the insurgents may have with the locals who wish a pox on both our houses.

Like most Democrats these days, Clark starts out fine and then wets himself with worry that someone will think he’s “weak”. So he proposes yet another completely unworkable “plan” that merely produces the same result as the current “plan” and that’s no solution at all.