Iraq ... The End Game

For at least 3 years now, shelves in bookstores have been filling up with "How we Lost Iraq" and "Bush-Hitler's Quagmire". Even now, as every day seems to solidify victory in Iraq, most media and leftist academia focus only on what went wrong or could yet go wrong. While begrudging admittance that things are on the up can be found regularly, any bombing or slight spike in troop deaths and the wires hum with renewed glee. The purpose, of course, is to detract from the fact that there are some very real strategic victories that are unfolding ... not just in Anbar, but globally in the War on Islamic Fundamentalism.

Victor Davis Hanson spells out the contradictions and almost schyzophrenic politics that surround Iraq, and he does it with convincing logic:

Iraqi was always an optional war, one that could either do great harm to our national interest and security or offer great advantage to the United States and the region, depending on its costs and the ultimate outcome. Between 2005 and 2006, public support for the war was mostly lost — trisection of the country and American withdrawal were considered our options. In 2008 there is instead a real chance that the original aims of the war — establishing a constitutional government, defeating terrorism militarily, and convincing the Arab population to reject terrorism — are at last possible.

It is the nature of this strange war that we know far more about who failed and what went wrong, far less about who succeeded and what went right. We believe that the dividends of the war — a constitutional government in Iraq and a stunning defeat of radical Islamic jihadists — happened by accident, while the 4,000 dead are the responsibility of our leaders, not the tenacity of the enemy or the costs of waging war in general. The more that the violence subsides and the costs wind down, the more Americans in a near recession will complain of the expense. The more the Iraqis finally begin to exercise responsible political power, the more Americans will lament there is no way to translate tactical victory into long-term strategic advantage.

Iraq, you see, long ago has become a mirror in which we all see only what we want.