Pulitzer-prize winner Steve Coll ("Ghost War") is in rare form here. This short Comment is worth your time.

The President has spent December in sleeves-rolled-up discussions with State Department experts and military officers, apparently searching for such ideas. It seems a little late in his chief-executive-style Presidency for such an earnest return to graduate school. Worse, he remains imprisoned by his binary vision and rhetoric. When he emerged from one Iraq cram session, a reporter asked if he had heard any encouraging new plans. The President could only think to say, "I’ve heard some ideas that would lead to defeat. And I reject those ideas."

The arrogance and the incompetence that brought the United States to this moment in Iraq cannot release it from the obligations and the interests, some of indefinite duration, that require its persistence there.

We should send the next President to Fort Leavenworth. Or, rather, to save time, maybe the next President should come from Fort Leavenworth. Or at least the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.