Nobody--not even the President--would dispute the notion that Iraq is more of a mess than the administration thought it would be by now. The question is: what will it take to succeed, and how do we get from where we are today to where we want to be tomorrow.

I don't have answers to those questions. But one thing is clear: a Kerry administration will have more options in Iraq than the Bush administration does today. That's not because Kerry is necessarily smarter, nicer, or a better human being. It is simply because Kerry would be different, and would have the ability to leave behind some of our current Iraqi baggage.

This is a situation which is common in all kinds of organizations when they get in deeper than expected. Sometimes, new management is what's needed to turn things around, because the old management has (intentionally or otherwise) closed off its options. New management has two advantages when dealing with a bad situation:

No Ego
Often, the leaders of an organization put their personal credibility on the line when endorsing a particular strategy. When the strategy doesn't work, it can be extremely difficult to change direction, since that would require publicly admitting the mistake, and a perceived loss of credibility.

This dynamic is clearly at work in the Bush administration, in their refusal to admit that there might have been any mistakes made anywhere in the prosecution of the war on terrorism. Ironically, in this situation, the bad strategy is plainly obvious to everyone (often including the leaders who can't bring themselves to admit it), and owning up to the mistake and moving on will actually win more credibility than continuing to deny the obvious. Nevertheless, the ego tied up in the flawed strategy is too great, and the perceived loss of face to extreme, that the leader can never get past it.

Bringing in someone new completely removes this barrier to change, since the new person has no personal stake in defending the decisions of the old leadership. He can quickly point out the obvious and move on.

The other way to get past the ego barrier is to find a way to change strategies without overtly admitting that the old strategy was a mistake. This may have been part of the motivation behind the Bush administration's insistence upon the June 30th deadline to hand over power to a (still nonexistent) Iraqi regime. If that's the case, then the June 30th strategy has backfired, since that date itself no longer has any credibility, yet the administration continues to cling to the flawed deadline.

No Burned Bridges
It is often necessary for a leader to burn some bridges to implement a plan. Much of management and leadership is built around personal relationships, but some of those relationships are inevitably damaged when the leadership insists on a particular strategy which some people don't like (and there's always someone who doesn't agree with the plan).

Over time, these relationships can be healed, especially if the strategy is a success. Unfortunately, our strategy (post-war) in Iraq is not perceived as a success in much of the world. Bush has few options when appealing to other countries to help secure and rebuild Iraq, and our allies are diminishing over time, not growing. And it doesn't help matters any that in order to go to war in Iraq in the first place, Bush burned a lot of bridges among our European allies like France and Germany.

New leadership has the chance to reach out to some of those people, and regain allies to fix the problem, where the old leadership will have a hard time overcoming the damage which has already been done. Kerry may not be able to get troops from France and Germany, but he stands a much better chance of getting those countries to endorse whatever strategy he comes up with for Iraq. Bush has essentially no ability at this point to bring those countries on board, because of the damage he caused to his relationships with those leaders.