Orlando Patterson on the failed war on drugs, and Maureen Dowd on why she feels good about the war with Iran.

Preoccupation with Iraq has drawn attention from another unwinnable American war that has been far more destructive of life both at home and abroad and has caused far greater collateral damage in other countries, in addition to spreading contempt for American foreign engagements. This is the failed war on drugs.

It was Nixon who, in 1971, first declared war on drugs. As with Iraq, the strategy is flawed in its conception and execution, made worse by a refusal to change course in the face of failure. It strongly emphasizes eradicating the source of drugs, interdiction of traffic and draconian punishment for offenders. It neglects what nearly every expert believes — and European experience has shown — to be the only successful strategy: a demand-side emphasis on preventive programs and rehabilitation of addicts. The present administration’s claims of a shift to preventive measures is belied by the budget of its drug control office, which allocates a 94 percent share to disrupting the supply, mainly through environmentally hazardous spraying in Latin America and the Caribbean that alienates local farmers.

The domestic results are tragic: an enormous increase in the incarceration of young, disproportionately minority Americans, resulting in the waste of human resources and the creation of a prison culture that converts nonviolent addicts into hardened criminals, without any impact on drug use. Within a year of release, 43.5 percent of drug offenders are rearrested. Recent surveys indicate a steady increase in the use of illicit drugs: more than 40 percent of Americans over 12 have used them at some point. Nearly all Caribbean societies are involved with narcotrafficking and, in the case of Jamaica, large-scale production and export of marijuana. In 2001, illicit drug shipments in the region were worth more money than the top five legitimate exports combined. The results have been devastating. Political corruption and payment in arms threatens the sovereignty and stability of many states. In 1985, the chief minister and minister of commerce of the Turks and Caicos Islands were arrested in Miami and imprisoned in America for drug offenses.

Drug addiction and violent crime are now endemic in Jamaica, Puerto Rico and even small islands like St. Kitts. The corruption of the police and other security forces has reached a crisis point in Jamaica, where an officer can earn the equivalent of half a year’s salary by simply looking the other way. Last year, 1,300 people were murdered here, in a population of only three million — and that was an improvement on the previous year.

Dr. Peter Phillips, Jamaica’s very competent minister of national security, estimates that 60 percent of the murders are drug related. Calling cocaine trafficking and use the “taproot” of a “web of criminality,” he said drugs sustain a “self-perpetuating culture of extreme violence” extending to many areas of the society.

The drug culture is highly transnational and organized, exemplified by the Jamaican “posses” that terrorized America in the 1980s with some 4,900 murders. Traffickers increasingly operate offshore, taking advantage of better arms, faster boats and more efficient tracking equipment than those available to local security forces.

Phillips is puzzled by America’s inflexible emphasis on eradication and interdiction and its refusal to provide help where it is most needed, like the rebuilding of corrupted police forces. He provided a telling example of the futility of current approaches. With Americans and Jamaicans working closely together recently, the percentage of transshipments of Colombian cocaine to the U.S. that went through Jamaica was reduced from 20 to 2. But this had no effect on the amount of cocaine entering America — the traffickers simply changed routes — and it increased violent crime in Jamaica. Drug dons became more murderous in turf wars, as there was less cocaine and money to go around.

America’s unwillingness to recognize the socioeconomic context of the drug crisis at home and abroad, to see that being surrounded by failing states threatens its security, to provide aid where it is most effective, and to acknowledge that the root cause of this hemispheric disaster is not supply but its own citizens’ insatiable demand for illicit drugs, is as incomprehensible as the quagmire in Iraq.

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A Ford White House aide mentioned in last Saturday’s column should have been Robert Goldwin, not Goldman.

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is a guest columnist.

And now here comes Maureen Dowd.

I feel good about the new war with Iran.

How can you not have confidence in the crackerjack team that brought you Operation Iraqi Freedom, which foundered and led to Operation Together Forward, which stumbled and led to Operation Together Forward II, which collapsed and was replaced by The New Way Forward, the Surge now being launched even though nobody’s together and everything’s going backward?

I say, bring it on. If a pre-emptive war in Iraq doesn’t work, why not try a pre-emptive war on Iran in Iraq?

Although Tony Snow dismissed the idea of war with Iran as an “urban legend” yesterday, Condi Rice revealed to New York Times reporters that President Bush acted months ago to parry Iran’s ambitions, issuing orders for a military campaign against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces sneaking into Iraq. Using diplomatic passports, the agents have been smuggling in sophisticated bomb-making components and infrared trigger devices, which could be used to blow up American soldiers.

The move against Iran allows the president and Dick Cheney — who was, natch, militating for the Surge — to blow off, once more, the Iraq Study Group and Congress, to push back rather than make up.

James Baker and Lee Hamilton had recommended playing nice with the mad mullahs, which even they acknowledged was a long shot, given that the Bush administration can offer them little except acquiescence in their nuclear weapons program, which is not going to happen.

Joe Biden, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned Condi on Thursday that Mr. Bush did not have the authority to pursue the networks over the border into Iran or Syria. On Friday, Bob Gates assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Iranians they target won’t be in Iran.

We’re trying to stanch a self-inflicted wound: our failed occupation gave Iran the opening in Iraq we’re now trying to shut down.

The White House had to admit this week what has been obvious to everybody else for eons, including a list of lame assumptions they embraced during the first few years of the occupation: “Majority of Iraqis will support the coalition and Iraqi efforts to build a democratic state” has now been supplanted by “Iraqis increasingly disillusioned with coalition efforts.”

It’s a remarkable moment, W. standing nearly alone, deserted by more and more Republicans, generals and Americans, risking it all on a weak reed like Prime Minister Maliki.

It’s impossible to know what W. was really thinking as he stiffly delivered his fantasy scheme in the White House library. The whole capital was fraught, but the president may simply have been musing to himself: “I’m hungry ... I wonder what time the game starts on ESPN? ...Has anybody read all these books?”

W. always acts like he’s upping the ante in a board game where you roll the dice and bet your plastic army divisions on the outcome. This doesn’t surprise some of his old classmates at Yale, who remember Junior as the riskiest Risk player of them all, known for dropping by the rooms of friends, especially when they were trying to study for exams, for extended bouts of “The Game of Global Domination.”

Junior was known as an extremely aggressive player in the venerable Parker Brothers board game, a brutal contest that requires bluster and bluffing as you invade countries, all the while betraying alliances. Notably, it’s almost impossible to win Risk and conquer the world if you start the game in the Middle East, because you’re surrounded by enemies.

His gamesmanship extended to sports — he loved going into overtime and demanding that points be played over because he wasn’t quite ready.

As Graydon Carter recollects in the new Vanity Fair, Gail Sheehy wrote an article for the magazine about W. that made this point: “Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn’t lose. He’ll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him.”

W.’s best friend when he was a teenager in Houston, Doug Hannah, told Ms. Sheehy: “If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15.”

Even if it was clear who was winning, W. wanted to go further to see what would happen. It was a technique that worked well in Tallahassee in 2000, but not so well in Tikrit.

Word is that even as they Surge, the Bush team is already working on Plan C, or as they will no doubt call it, The New, New Way Forward II.