Drinking Sand in Iraq

I love my country more than I dislike George Bush, so it’s tempting to believe Michael Barone’s contention today that, in Iraq, “instead of accepting defeat and inviting chaos, we may be able to achieve a significant measure of success.”

Tempting but not sustainable--the crumbs we are being fed about local gains by Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon in their New York Times OpEd piece last week and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on Meet the Press yesterday are not enough to nourish hope for overall improvement in that shattered nation.

Even in his upbeat assessment, Gates admitted that “the problem when we would go after Al Qaeda and insurgents before is that when we would hit them in one place, they’d squirt to another place. For the first time the commander has enough forces that he can attack all of their basic locations at the same time, so it’s much more difficult for them to squirt out and escape...”

For now. But how long will we have to keep the troops we have there in place and how many more will it take to stop the “squirting” all over Iraq? And how much good will local pacification be if the central government fails, as it has so far, to come together even on the simplest issues?

There is so much Iraq Fatigue in the U.S. that a change in the narrative is like an oasis in the desert, but we can’t let ourselves be sidetracked by another mirage and end up trying to drink the sand.

A War We Might Just Win--or Maybe Not

After all the gabble today over the Times’ OpEd piece about “winning” in Iraq, it turns out to be a misunderstanding--or more accurately, a mis-titling.

This evening, co-author Kenneth Pollack told Wolf Blitzer on CNN: “Mike and I did not choose the title. We had nothing to do with it...we came back optimistic--but very guardedly optimistic...

”It's not necessarily the title Mike and I would have chosen for it. But when you write for the Times, the Times gets to choose the title...

”As we say in the piece, I don't know what victory really means. You know, if victory means that we're going to create a country like Switzerland, you know, Iraq is at least 50 or 60 years away from that.”

So a more accurate title, if the writers of the piece were to choose it, would have been “A War We Might Just Win in 50 Years.”

Oops.

Great reporter that he is, Wolf failed to ask Pollack what the original title was. It would have been nice to know.