Iraq, the most ill-conceived military undertaking in our history.

Insurgents run rampant and Rumsfeld grows more stubborn. We're etching a big black mark across American history.

IRAQ: One word says it all: disaster

We do not need to recount yet again the history of the war in Iraq. It will go down as one of the most ill-conceived military undertakings in our history.

The recently disclosed July report of the National Intelligence Council to President Bush tells us we are in grave trouble. The Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and another Republican committee member, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, concur. If the failures of former CIA Director George Tenet justified throwing him overboard, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the godfather of this Iraq disaster, should have been chained to Tenet.

President George W. Bush often asks, rhetorically, "Isn't the world better off with Saddam Hussein out of power?" The answer is no, no, no. Saddam, a brutal dictator, is in jail. That's good. But we have paid a bloody, awful price; a price we will be paying for years to come. The Iraq we created now is an international menace, a citadel for terrorism far more dangerous than the declining Saddam regime we deposed. Sometimes, the cure really is worse than the disease.

The next president will do a "song and dance" routine with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He will ask for combat troops, and that request will be refused, of course. The dying in Iraq is and will be left to us.

The next president will then ask NATO to undertake and pay for a massive training program of Iraqi soldiers and police. But the United States is the cash register for Iraq and will remain so. That, at least, makes it possible that NATO would play a role in such a training program - but on our credit card.

Remember the Nixon-Kissinger "peace with honor" policy in the Vietnam War? While that administration dithered creating a South Vietnamese army that was - on paper, anyway - the fourth largest, best equipped force in the world, 15,760 U.S. soldiers were killed in action. Yet most analysts, even at the time, knew that the policy amounted to a velvet "cut and run," an empty gesture to provide face-saving cover for an American withdrawal.

That won't work in Iraq. There can be no finger-crossing or winks. Our blundering, horrid misadventure in Iraq has to succeed, and it will take years and years.

Pay no attention to Bush and Rumsfeld when they say "We expected this" or "The insurgents are desperate" or "Things are improving" in Iraq. It's pure drivel. The insurgents have an inexhaustible supply of suicide bombers. Our army, the still-pitiful Iraqi army and the people of Iraq are getting clobbered.

Fouad Ajami and Francis Fukuyama, distinguished academics at Johns Hopkins University who once advised Rumsfeld that Iraq could become a democracy, have had second thoughts. Princeton's Bernard Lewis, the most acclaimed Western scholar of the Muslim world, now ventures to say that perhaps Iraq should be a monarchy headed by someone from the Hashemite line.

One thing is certain: Rumsfeld will join Robert McNamara as the two most disastrous defense secretaries in our history. McNamara has spent the last 37 years doing mea culpas around the world. Do not expect that from Rumsfeld. He never has been wrong. He will go to his grave self-described as the man who "liberated" Iraq.

These are the words of former Missouri Senator Thomas F. Eagleton in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. A good summary of the incompetence and arogance that resulted in the U.S. being mired in a quagmire of sand.