More Liberal Fallacious Philosophy on Iraq

This one comes courtesy of Michael Kinsley. Ironically enough, Charles Krauthammer penned a piece today that may as well have been written in response to this one. Here is the crucial part of Krauthammer's piece...

We get news of the Anbar Awakening, which has now spread to other Sunni areas and Baghdad. The sectarian civil strife that the Democrats insisted was the reason for us to leave dwindles to the point of near disappearance. Much of Baghdad is returning to normal. There are 90,000 neighborhood volunteers -- ordinary citizens who act as auxiliary police and vital informants on terror activity -- starkly symbolizing the insurgency's loss of popular support. Captured letters of al-Qaeda leaders reveal despair as they are driven -- mostly by Iraqi Sunnis, their own Arab co-religionists -- to flight and into hiding.

After agonizing years of searching for the right strategy and the right general, we are winning. How do Democrats react? From Nancy Pelosi to Barack Obama the talking point is the same: Sure, there is military progress. We could have predicted that. (They in fact had predicted the opposite, but no matter.) But it's all pointless unless you get national reconciliation. "National" is a way to ignore what is taking place at the local and provincial level, such as Shiite cleric Ammar al-Hakim, scion of the family that dominates the largest Shiite party in Iraq, traveling last October to Anbar in an unprecedented gesture of reconciliation with the Sunni sheiks.

Now, Krauthammer goes on to discuss two pieces of critical legislation that have recently been passed by the embattled national government. The point that Krauthammer makes is that ultimately nothing will be enough. Even with these two new pieces of legislation, the war opponents will still cry foul and find another reason to consider the surge a failure.

That seems to be the S.O.P. of the committed left that refuses to see the success in Iraq for what it is. They are so invested in destroying Bush's legacy that they will rationalize all success into failure. As more success happens, the goal posts continue to be moved in order to make their own version of success some sort of nebulous utopia that no one can possible be expected to move.

This brings me back to Kinsley. Kinsley readily admits that by any objective analysis of any data: economic, fatality, political, etc. the surge has been a success.

It is now widely considered beyond dispute that Bush has won his gamble. The surge was a terrific success. Choose your metric: attacks on American soldiers, car bombs, civilian deaths, potholes. They're all down, down, down. Lattes sold by street vendors are up. Performances of Shakespeare by local repertory companies have tripled. Skepticism seems like sour grapes. If you opposed the surge, you have two choices. One is to admit that you were wrong, wrong, wrong. The other is to sound as if you resent all the good news and remain eager for disaster. Too many opponents of the war have chosen option two.

Yet, he still maintains that the surge has been a failure because we will have as many troops at the end as we had before we started.

But we needn't quarrel about all this -- or deny the reality of the good news -- to say that, at the very least, the surge has not worked yet. The test is simple and built into the concept of a surge: Has it allowed us to reduce troop levels to below where they were when it started? And the answer is no.

In fact, Bush laid down the standard of success when he announced the surge more than a year ago: "If we increase our support at this crucial moment and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home." At the time, there were about 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq. Bush proposed to add up to 20,000 troops. Although Bush never made any official promises about a timetable, the surge was generally described as lasting six to eight months

Now, it seems that not only did the surge need to tamp down violence, flip Iraqis to our side, create bottom up reconciliation and top to bottom reconciliation, but also we need to remove as many troops out of the theater as quickly as possible. This is the first time in the history of warfare that success and failure of a war is measured by troop levels and not other metrics like violence, economic activity, and political reconciliation. Now that every other measure has been met by the surge, some liberals, Kinsley specifically, want to claim that success needs to be measured by how many troops we can move out of the theater.

The anti war left has been fascinated with bringing the troops home since the beginning of the war. Don't get me wrong I want the troops home soon. It is also easier for me to analyze the situation than it is for the average soldier who has to be in the field. That said, measuring success by the troop level we have is trivial and nonsensical. The bottom line is that up until the surge started, we had a failing strategy and we had it for years. Now, we have a successful strategy, but on top of political, military and economic success it is unrealistic for this strategy to also provide for massive troop drawdowns in less than two years of operation.

Furthermore, it is beside the point. We have flipped the overwhelming majority of the Sheiks and that strategy has increased the numbers of Iraqis in the military and the police dramatically. Those folks need our assisstance and they will need it for a while, however we are developing a strategy that will ultimately allow for significant draw downs. That will happen when the Iraqis are trained enough not to need our help. No one can put a time on it, but even Kinsley himself doesn't deny that it isn't happening. His apparent measure of success is that it isn't happening fast enough. Never has war been fought by such an artificial clock. Does it matter how quickly we get it done or that we get it done right? Apparently to Kinsley, and others like him, it is the former. To those of us that still value victory above all it is the latter.