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The time for more time has passed.

In a recent posting entitled Déjà Vu on The Huffington Post, Randy Beers, president of the National Security Network, a progressive think-tank focusing on foreign policy and politics, has presented on of the most cogent analyses of he present situation in Iraq, why the present military strategy there will not work, and what new strategy just might.

Here is a sampling:

Unable in this environment to foresee what the United States and the international community will do next, Iraqis are choosing the proximate security of their faction over any broader vision. Unable to depend on the central government, the United States now aligns itself with local militias in hopes of achieving local success, but, in reality, merely reinforcing factionalism and undermining the national government we profess to defend.

As a young lieutenant, I was taught that a failing strategy demanded alternatives. Committing one's forces to costly frontal assaults in the Iraqi quagmire is better replaced by a strategy allowing flexibility and economy of force. The time for more time has passed. It's time for Iraq's neighbors to join the political reconciliation process in Iraq or, at minimum, to contain the violence to Iraq. It's time for serious U.S. involvement in the Middle East Peace Process. And it's time to focus on the real Al Qaeda along the Pak-Afghan border. But only beginning the U.S. disengagement from Iraq will allow such alternatives to prosper.

Once again we are reminded that one of the most common reasons for continuing ot choose what is not working is the idea of a "sunk cost", and that hte only way out of that rtap is to realize that those costs are indeed "sunk", so they should no longer be part of any decision-making caculus.