had won the war, but that the de Gaulle government had simply abandoned it for political reasons. General Stanley McCrystal was relieved in Afghanistan largely because he was already beginning to sing a similar tune even before the war was over. West's op-ed is, sadly, in exactly the same tradition.

West argues, to begin with, that the small training groups which the Obama Administration is now sending to Iraq will not be sufficient to strengthen the Iraqi army. He is right. But he also argues vehemently that he and other advisers turned things around between Fallujah and Ramadi (now both securely in the hands of ISIS) in 2007-8 by insisting on daily combat patrols by the Iraqis, and by pairing Iraqi units with American ones. That may be true,to quote a famous, anonymous North Vietnamese officer in 1975--but it is also irrelevant. The American effort was doomed because there was no long-term political basis for creating the kind of Iraq we had in mind--a pluralistic democracy allied with the United States.

West is certainly intelligent, and at times he seems to understand this. He knows that the Shi'ite-dominated, Iran-allied government that we helped to create hopelessly alienated the Sunnis after we left in 2011. He also admits that it was originally George W. Bush who agreed to that deadline, but rather than simply acknowledge that the Iraqi government did not want a large, permanent American presence, he blames Barack Obama for not doing enough to get the decision reversed. But what West can't do is to admit