Failed Strategy

I keep reading hearing that the Bush Administration is "persuing the same failed strategy" in Iraq. Over and over, ad nauseum.

I would like to ask these perenial critics just what that failed strategy is? Not what is failed about it, but about what "it" is in the first place? They keep insisting that it's been the same one all along.

I would like to ask them because I don't think they'd know "strategy" if it bit them on the nose.

I think, in the end, the only way you could interpret the answer you'd get from them would be:

Fighting

Any strategy that involves fighting is, well .... fighting, and that's the resolution of their measuring devices (this from the keepers of the Holy Book of Nuance).