"It took Bush three years to find his general (as it did Lincoln) and turn a losing war into a winnable one. "
Another way of looking at it is that it took Robert Gates ten minutes to find the right man for the job after Donald Rumsfeld drove out most of the Generals who disagreed with his strategy during his time in office.
Stalemate with North Korea? That is so early 1950s.
Posted at 2007-12-22 09:49:45 [PermaLink]No one seriously believes that North Korea poses an immediate threat to South Korea (or anyone else), anymore, and they've given up, at least for now, on producing nuclear weapons. Moreover, I haven't seen anything recently suggesting the North Koreans are up to their old stunts of, for example, kidnapping South Korean and Japanese civilians. They may still be the most repressive regime on earth, and export arms to anyone with the money to pay for them, but the situation is a far cry from a stalemate. They're slowing losing ground and will either change or become a fossilized threat to no one.
Iran is more problematic, they continue to fund terrorism and maintain the capability to continue working towards building an atomic bomb, even if they've temporarily halted their progressive in that direction. It's a problem that will be inherited by the next administration, but it's not yet time to label it a failure.