I'm not saying this will work. Because how would I know?

I'm not pretending to know anything about it. But for the record, this column by Nicholas D. Kristof seems to me the best answer to the "Okay, starting up in Iraq was a mistake, but now what the hell do we do?" question.

For whatever my opinion is worth.

It begins:

Iraq in the Rear-View Mirror
By Nicholas D. Kristof

"As we puzzle over how to end our nightmare in Iraq, the central question is the one raised by The Times on Aug. 7: “How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for?”

Not this Times, though. It was The Times of London on Aug. 7, 1920, as a ferocious insurgency threatened the British occupation of Iraq.

The British had also started out thinking that they were liberators, only to find that they had catastrophically underestimated Iraqi nationalism.

Column courtesy of Egalia.