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“In how many countries have we “made it possible” for them to be saved? One of the more recent nations we helped out was Afghanistan, when Russia wanted to eat them up. How did that work out for us?”

It worked out very well for us.
The USSR was defeated, and collapsed partially due to the internal dramas unleashed by that disastrous war and its consequences.

Our follow-up was quite bad, which is why we got the Taliban.

But the strategy itself worked brilliantly.

As to the political support business, it is axiomatic: you declare war and create a unity government. There WAS political support, quite solid, at the start of the war. You get the declaration and you bring both parties into the war cabinet in order to keep it. You use press censorship, under the World War II precedents, to prevent the Abu Graib style attacks on morale. With the Democrats fully engaged in the process, and getting as much credit for the war as Republicans, we wouldn’t have ended up with the Democrats using the war as the basis for their opposition. And with proper press censorship, there wouldn’t have been the grist for the mill flying around.

Anyway, you asked. That’s what I would have done.
It’s water under the bridge now.

Now, I’d arm the Kurds and the Shi’ite nationalist and stand aside for the slaughter in which they established regional dominance. With them in charge, I would pull back forces to distant bivouacs (as the ultimate safeguard) and let them govern their enclaves as they please, but using force to kill whatever sneaks across the Iranian and Syrian border. Pretty simple, really. There wouldn’t be political support for this approach in the US once the bloodshed started, but nobody else is going to intervene in that snake pit over there, and once the sides we favor are armed, there isn’t much left for us to do other than avert our eyes.

And yes, I think that a much more aggressive prosecution of the war, from the very beginning, would have engendered tremendous political support and international support. Men love a winning horse.

One of the key World War II precedents is censorship of the media. That is why making the clean break with the Korea-to-present past is so important. The symbolism of getting the Full Monty Declaration of War is key. It takes us to World War II. Pressing the precedents of World War II is key. Bringing Democrats into the cabinet so that they share in the glory is key. Oh, and you use the secret files to destroy politicians for treason in real war. Remember those guys who flew to Baghdad? You do not let their plane leave, and you arrest them and charge them with treason when they get back. It’s REAL WAR if it’s declared, and in our precedent-haunted society, that means the World War II precedents.

You mobilize a country by getting Congress to declare war. That has always been the problem since World War II: either the President was too timid because he didn’t want to derail his domestic agenda (LBJ, Bush 43) or the cause is so strange and cranky that the people WOULDN’T support a war declaration (Korea). The People and Congress WOULD HAVE supported a war declaration in September, 2001. The country was livid, and ready to fight. The unity was palpable. Bush squandered his FDR moment.

But suppose you’re right, and the unity could not have been gotten to declare war generally. Then I would have sought a DoW on specific countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria. And if Congress would grant NONE of those? That’s unrealistic. In September 2001, Congress would have declared war, at least, on Afghanistan. But we are moving here to the denoument of our discussion.

You wrote this:

“I think President Bush looked at this and realized it was going to be a long, hard fight. One that would last for years and probably beyond his administration. Knowing that, he had to choose between a full-on war which required great sacrifices from all Americans, or a more limited approach that would leave most of the country able to go about their business. It was clearly to be a long, hard slog in any case, but this way deprived the terrorists of their objective of severely disrupting American life. And we are winning anyway!
The only thing that could derail the war would be a weak-kneed forced pullout orchestrated by a Democrat congress. If that happens, it will not be Bush’s fault!! I refuse to lay the blame for cowardly, America-hating politicians on the President’s head.”

Well, my view is that it doesn’t matter where political blame falls or not. I am totally uninterested in the reputations of politicians, good or bad. They are just men. One comes one goes, completely and utterly replaceable. What I DO care about, as Card does, is national honor. To be defeated in a war is a DISASTER. It DOESN’T MATTER what the Democrats or Republicans did back in 1975. What MATTERS is that the American ally, South Vietnam, collapsed utterly, after a long war with massive loss of life on both sides, and that the Americans were scurrying out in the last helicopters off the rooftops. That’s what’s important. It’s important because it shapes future history unalterably, not just in Vietnam, but in the United States. You have described the calculations you think Bush made. I think he used a different calculus, but either way, it doesn’t matter. America cannot lose a full-committment, declared war. We are too strong. If we focus on a war, we will win. To not focus on a war with all of our might is to put our soldiers in harm’s way and expose them to political risk they would not have in a full dress, Constitutionally-declared war. The risk is simple, and we’ve seen it over and over again, especially in Korea and Vietnam: if the country isn’t committed to a juridically real war with a full mobilization, the political opposition uses opposition to the war as a rallying point to try and get control of the government. Ike did it. Nixon did it. Kerry tried it, and next year, if we continue on our present strategy, either Hillary Clinton or Obama will succeed. And then America loses the war and all of the losses of life and limb and treasure end up being utterly in vain.
My view is that you do not take that risk with American soldier’s lives, or with American reputation and honor. IF you are to go to war at all, you offer the people the option of WAR, with all of its hardships and mobilizations, and you cause them politically bind themselves to it, through their Congress voting for it. If they will not, and their Congress will not, then you do not go to war at all. If we commit, we always win. When we do not commit, we never win. At best we draw. Usually, as in the Bay of Pigs, and Vietnam, and Beirut, we lose. Losing a war is the worst thing that the country can do. It were better to never fight a war at all than to start it, go into it half-assed, find out it’s tougher than you expected, be defeated by political exhaustion at home, collapse, and retreat in defeat, leaving thousands of your dead on a field of battle you lost. That’s what we did in Vietnam, and to a smaller degree in Cuba and in Beirut and Somalia. My view of American military history and the NECESSITY of getting Congress to commit to war essentially rules Bush’s calculation, as you described it, as a chump’s game. He rolled the dice on a limited war, in spite of the bad track record and the certitude of rising opposition, when he could have followed the more conservative, traditional, constitutionally-sanctioned and successful course to certain victory.
So, perhaps you don’t do it, but I consider the Korean stalemate, with all of the American dead, to have been a strategic defeat for America and a moral victory for the enemy, and I lay the blame squarely at the feet of Truman, who could have asked the country to go to war, but chose to play at war.
I lay the blame for the Cuban fiasco at the feed of JFK. If you are not willing to go to war and fight to win, do not commit men to die in battle at all.
I lay the blame for the defeat in Vietnam at the feet of LBJ. With the Gulf of Tonkin incident, he had a Congress - a Democratic Congress - willing to declare war, but he asked for less. Why? Because he didn’t want to distract too much from the great society. So, we did not commit, and a half-assed committment by America was not enough to defeat the enemy. We lost 55,000 lives and 300,000 limbs in vain, and were humiliated. The image of the Americans fleeing from the rooftops in Saigon is the consequence of the decision to not go to war properly.
I lay the blame for the Beirut incident at the feet of Reagan. If you are going to send men into battle, send them in armed and allow them to fight. Or don’t go at all.
I blame Bush 41 AND Clinton for the Somalia fiasco. We went in with overwhelming force. We COULD HAVE eliminated the warlords at once. We CHOSE not to. Then we changed our mind, got ill-equipped soldiers and airmen shot up, and retreated precipitously. It was an abject performance. In every case, it would have been better never to have gone into Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Beirut and Somalia rather than to go in and fail to achieve victory, or outright lose.

And I lay the blame for the slow march into the night in Iraq at the feet of Bush. He had the advantage of 20/20 hindsight. He had the advantage of advisors who ought to have studied these things. He CHOSE to imitate LBJ instead of FDR. And we - especially our soldiers - are bearing the consequences of that now.

You said that it is important to separate the military from the political. I profoundly and utterly disagree, with every fiber of my being. War IS politics. It is declared by politicians and commanded by politicians, with a political objective as its purpose. Politics starts wars, and politics ends wars. Whenever we have committed completely, totally to wars politically, we have won. Whenever we have not committed politically, it is political collapse that precipitates defeat on the battlefield.
I will not go so far as to say that “police actions” are unconstitutional. They are within the range of things the Congress can authorize. What I will say is that they are politically stupid. If something that is going to get Americans killed in battle is not sufficiently important for Congress to pronounce the formal solemnity: “America declares war...” then we should not be going to war at all.
If the political will does not exist at the outset to get the full declaration, then it will only get worse as the war drags on (which any substantial limited war against a large enemy will), and it will be political collapse that precipitates the loss of the war. We have been through the same thing over and over and over again since 1945, and 9/11 was a more massive and devastating event than even Pearl Harbor. Bush should have asked for a full DoW. He didn’t, and now we face the consequences. You say that the political collapse will be the fault of the Democrats. And that will certainly be partly true. But Bush set us up for it, quite predictably (I was disconsolate in late September, 2001, when it became clear America would NOT formally declare war). He is the Commander-in-Chief. HE took the choice to not go to war, but to resort to police action and call it war. Given history, he should have known better. I have known better all along. Why didn’t he?

As far as your comments about the different nature of our enemy go, I am ignoring nothing. I recognize all of these things about our enemy, and as such, I recognize that the greater latitude for violence and the use of heavy weapons against populations in a declared, full-on-war, is more effective at thinning out enemy populations than the limited war approach we have taken.

AS to your final comment, you have it completely wrong. Precisely because I will not go to war unless Congress inextricably commits itself and the country to war by formally and unequivocally declaring it, as leader I cannot be “led around by the nose” from one thing to the next. If the country won’t support the war at the outset enough to call it a war legally, with all those consequences, then I know with a high degree of certitude that I damn the country to defeat and disgrace if I go to war anyway, in some sort of half-assed way. Only if a foreign power does something so egregious that Congress itself will declare war will I be sending troops into extended combat abroad, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am not going to pretend, as the Constitution Party does, that the Constitution REQUIRES a formal DoW for the President to send troops into major battle. It does not. But to go to an extended war without a DoW is to court very likely defeat.

And finally, this bit: “So, yes, you make some moving arguments and you have the fire of a fighter, but you really like the idea of ignoring what everyone else thinks. That’s one of the surest marks of a totalitarian dictator.”
This is the strangest remark of all. It is intended as a sneering insult. The problem with it is that it runs directly contrary to the entire thrust of my strategic view, which is that YOU DO NOT GO TO WAR AT ALL unless you get the full, solemn committment of Congress to formally declare the war, which is the very opposite of the idea of “ignoring what everyone else thinks”. It is, in fact, declaring the consensus of a society that it is a time to fight. With that declaration, the laws change, and American society has, over the course of its history, developed highly effective precedents for suppressing internal anti-war agitation during declared wars. Those precedents are all available, in our precedent-driven system, IF we undertake the formal step of getting full assent and committment to war.

If we don’t, we lose.
We didn’t for the War on Terror, and we are losing in Iraq.
You say we’re winning because we win all the battles. The “battles” are skirmishes with irregulars.
The decisive pivot is not those battles, it’s the political battlefield of Congress. With a DoW, you sieze that high ground before you start the war. Without one, you leave that ground open, because you’re afraid you can’t take it at the start. And it only gets harder as the war goes on, until finally it is from that ground that your own domestic political opponents defeat you.

America wins all of its declared wars.
I loses all of its undeclared major wars.
There is nothing hard about it.
We screwed the pooch in September, 2001.
Now we can’t win a resounding victory.
We can still hold off ignominious retreat, but to do it we have to arm the Iraqis so THEY can step up and do all the fighting.