Most of the people claiming that the war in Iraq is not winnable fall into two camps (many of them fall into both camps): 1) they’ve never been to Iraq (and definitely haven’t been to Iraq since 2003), and 2) have never served in the military, yet somehow still have a better understanding of military strategy and warfare management than our Nation’s top battle-proven Generals.
But, funny things can happen when those same skeptics and naysayers actually go to Iraq and see with their own eyes what is happening, and talk to the actual soldiers with boots on the ground.
And if they are honest about what they see, they write stuff like this:
VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory†but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops.
Sounds like it’s right out of a Fox News talking point, doesn’t it?
The source? The New York Times, which I usually dub the al Qaeda Times of New Yorkâ„¢ for their willingness to denigrate our Soldiers or putting them at greater risk by encouraging our enemies.
Read the entire article by Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack, who should be commended for their honesty. Hopefully the DialyKos and MoveOn (are they one and the same now?) will not decide to have these two men fired for betraying the party’s defeatist platform.
They conclude the article with this:
How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.
Which is a much more sensible approach than the “pull ‘em all out now” approach being yelled for by the majority of Democrats.
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For more honest reporting about what’s really happening in Iraq, make sure you read everything written by Michael Yon, Michael Totten, and Bill Roggio (at a minimum).
You understand this is an opinion piece by supporters of the initial invasion? Their attempt to pin the resulting death and destruction on Bush incompetence is a fig leaf to cover their own complicity.
Left by Preston on July 30th, 2007 at 12:16 pm