Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman had an Iraq epiphany after reading a blog by former Air Force intelligence officer John Robb, who is now a security and anti-terror consultant. “The problem,” Robb wrote at Global Guerillas, “has become bigger than our will to fix it.”

Bookman says that, in fact, was always the case.

The truth is, the gap between the problem and our will to fix it has existed from the moment this invasion was conceived. It was the fundamental flaw in the Bush policy, the single thing that doomed it to failure.

If we were going to invade and occupy Iraq, we should have done so with hundreds of thousands of troops, after months of intensive planning. We should have committed ourselves to spending as much money as it took, as much time as it took, as many lives as it took to ensure Iraq’s security.

But that level of national will did not exist, and the Bush administration knew it. Even in the wake of Sept. 11, they knew that the American people would never buy an optional war that large and expensive. They also knew that without a draft, they lacked the manpower that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki and others told them they needed.

Yet they wanted this war so badly — they yearned in their bones to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein and establish American military power in the heart of the Middle East — that they went ahead and did it anyway.

Since the American people wouldn’t buy a big war, we got sold a tidy war, a war in which “mission accomplished” could be declared quickly and Iraq could fund its own reconstruction. It was a fake war, an illusion of war, a war deceptively downsized to fit political will and not reality.

No wise leader does that. No wise leader commits his nation to a war he suspects it is not prepared to win, and we will pay a heavy price for that miscalculation.

Bookman predicts we will be in Iraq for years, defending our military outposts while the rest of the country grinds into increasingly violent decline. It’s not a very optimistic picture but is there anyone who thinks it’s not a possibility?