Bill Kristol on Fox yesterday said of Iraq, “We’ve been trying, and our soldiers are doing terrifically, but we have not had a serious three-year effort to fight a war in Iraq as opposed to laying the preconditions for getting out.” He also recommended killing terrorists.

I have the highest admiration for Kristol, but he makes it sound as though someone in the Pentagon should be hitting his forehead in a I-could-have-had-a-V8 moment and say, “I’ve got it! Why don’t we try to kill terrorists!” This is unfair. We have been trying–with some success–to kill terrorists in Iraq for about three years, and have been constantly adjusting how we do it to find the most effective, politically shrewd tactics. Are there things we would try to do differently in retrospect? Absolutely. But pretty much every counter-insurgency I’m aware of has involved a steep learning curve, because it is an inherently difficult form of warfare and always differs according to contours of the society and culture on the ground.

More troops might have made a difference up front, then again they might not have. The key thing would have been to crack-down early, but one reason we didn’t is that the administration believed in the “everyone inherently wants liberty” theory advanced by some neo-cons, so had a notion that toppling Saddam would be enough to create freedom in Iraq.

In his New York Times Magazine essay, Francis Fukuyama complains that neo-cons are “over-militarized.” Kristol is a pretty good example of this. If something goes wrong in Iraq, his first reaction is: troops, troops, troops. There might be a place for that, but Iraq is also a complex and subtle political problem, not always susceptible to easy solution by throwing more troops at it. The approach of training up Iraqis as we draw down our forces is not, if executed properly, an ignoble way to retreat from Iraq, but an entirely sensible strategy for promoting Iraq self-reliance, which in itself will be an important element of victory there.

For a while now, everyone in the US has been pre-positioning for what they will say in the event that the war really goes south. For one school of neo-conservatives, the line will apparently be that there never was an Iraq war, at least never a proper one.