The military IS political, and vice versa

At Ezra's, in the comments to this post, somebody makes the argument that, while the US Army may have been undermined politically, it has not been defeated militarily.

I do hate to repeat myself, but it's time once again to revisit some basic concepts of the use of military force.

Armies, air forces, and navies are means used towards specific ends. Sometimes the end in mind is something limited, like forcing the DPRK north of the 38th parallel. Sometimes the ends are more ambitious, like the unconditional surrender of Japan. But at the end of the day, these are political decisions - the US Pacific fleet would have been used much differently if, say, FDR had decided to end the war with the liberation of the Phillipines.

All this being said, it is difficult for me to understand the substantial difference in our response to the following two situations:

1) A foreign army is defeated in combat and driven off in disarray; or,

2) A foreign army is never defeated in combat, but fails to achieve a single substantive political objective and leaves the campaign in question having taken substantial casualties.

Now, obviously in a case of abject defeat the answer is simple: withdraw and sue for peace. Some people seem to be under the illusion that our response to the second situation - as it exists in Iraq today - is any different.

Arguably, not being "defeated in combat" allows the individual soldiers to retain a sense of honor and dignity. However, this is only true while simultaneously making the political leadership look much, much worse. A failure to achieve the desired ends would imply one of two things, after all: Either the ends specified were simply impossible ("the new Iraqi government will be a friend of Israel!"), the political leadership didn't apply sufficient means ("You go to war with the army you have"), or both.

In this sense, I think Iraq really is a mirror of Vietnam - the US government has committed a large fraction of the armed forces to a strategy that they no longer have the means to actually succeed. The only caveat to this might conceivably be that more means should be applied in Iraq, but in the actually-existing US armed forces today, the cupboard is bare. This leaves us only one option - withdrawal.

To round this out with another repetition:

The US Army no longer has the means to carry out any objectives in Iraq. It cannot prevent a civil war, it cannot support the Iraq government, and it almost certainly cannot take sides in a civil war without massive casualties. The US Army's presence cannot minimize bloodshed, if anything it is an aggravating factor. The US cannot help because the US does not have control. All that being true, the only sensible option is to leave - anything else just promises more bloodshed.