George Bush’s genius has been in understanding that this will be a decades-long war of attrition. He has had a consistently measured strategy throughout, and has carefully navigated a middle ground between appeasers and hawks.
Instead of using 300K+ troops from the outset in Iraq, he carefully dispatched troops to recognize the long-term nature of the fight, and added more only when Iraqis were truly ready to take back their country.
We only hear and read of the cost that this war is imposing on our own country and its allies. The terror masters, though, have endured losses and expended resources that are orders of magnitude greater than what we have put forward. And we are slowly but systematically winning. There was a time circa 2006 — which in retrospect will look very brief — when we seemed to be losing ground. But any objective analysis shows that at any given time we are gaining ground on 8 of every 10 fronts.
Were it not for the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb, there would be every reason to be pleased with the cumulative impact that we have had in rooting out terror, and in our long-term prospects. And regarding that bomb, I have to believe that our side is not as vulnerable as it appears. Between the US and the Israelies, I imagine that there are several viable contingency plans, and that we will see them when the time is appropriate.