In “Fiasco,” a sobering book on how our country’s leaders failed to identify and adjust to the problems associated with invading Iraq, Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks includes a telling quote from Ret. Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War:

“When you’re facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you’ll get the tactics right. If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever, but you still lose the war.”

The military’s current tactic is to increase its boot print in an effort to gain enough control of the country so that the Iraqi government can take charge. Winning hearts and minds is optional when it should be the key. Even if this tactic could succeed, our efforts would ultimately fail because Iraq’s leaders are not onboard.

The Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites are thinking of their factions first and country second, with U.S. needs far down the list. Against this backdrop of competing interests is a U.S. strategy that supposes that the key to victory is pushing the right military buttons.

More and more war supporters are beginning to see the futility of that strategy. In the past two weeks, prominent Republican members of Congress have urged the Bush administration to adopt the goals and solutions recommended by the Iraq Study Group, which correctly concluded that what we need is a political solution, not a military one. A bill that would do that also affixes a tough deadline of March for the beginning of an orderly troop drawdown.

Absent such a deadline, Iraq’s leaders will continue to act like new swimmers who will only venture into the deep end with life preservers. They’ll never swim until our military is unbuckled.

President Bush has correctly called the war on terror a conflict of ideologies. Although Iraq didn’t start off as a hotbed of terrorism, it has become one. But we don’t have an overall strategy to confront that issue, like we did with the policy of containment during the Cold War.

As the Iraq Study Group noted, we need to persuade Iraqis and their neighbors that our interests coincide with theirs. An Iraq that melts down into all-out civil war only benefits the terrorists. All other parties will have to deal with the violence and the swarm of refugees.

History has not been kind to occupiers, and that is how we are seen by most Iraqis and the international community. The increasing isolation of our position decreases the chance for success. The answer is a diplomatic surge, not kicking down doors.

The Bush administration begs for supporters to hold on until the mid-September progress report by Gen. David Petraeus. But the general said last month that he doesn’t expect the troop escalation to show many positive gains.

There is no reason to wait two more months before realizing that what we need is an overall strategy, not better tactics.