There are two must reads today on Iraq. The first is from the US News and World Report’s Fouad Ajami:
Beyond their pride, and the fury of their feuds, Iraqis of all stripes have now come to terms with their country’s desperate need of American protection and patronage. Ignore the pollsters who tell you that Iraqis have had their fill of the American presence. There is a realism that comes to men and women who know calamities, and this realism teaches Iraqis that this American project is their country’s chance for a way out of a history of grief and terror…
(The) American determination to see this war to a decent outcome, and the fatigue of the Iraqi protagonists, have transformed the landscape. We have been burned before, and progress has often vanished like a desert mirage, but there can be no denying the change that has come to Iraq… This is not a country at peace, and all its furies have not burned out, but a measure of order has begun to stick on the ground.
And then Rich Lowry, writing in the New York Post:
A war has probably never been so debated and so little understood as the one in Iraq. “The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we’re doing here,” says one U.S. officer. It’s a representative comment – offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact.
This is the lonely war. No one cares about it as much or understands it as well as the men and women here on the ground, who feel – understandably – that they’re the only ones even remotely engaged in the fight…
South of here in the rural Sunni area known as the “Triangle of Death,” there are 137 tribes and subtribes – what an officer of the 2nd Brigade of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division calls “an archipelago of complex societal islands.” We have begun to master them. The tribes have produced thousands of volunteers to police the area, and violence has plummeted.
But the story hasn’t gotten out. Troops laugh about a reporter who refused to get off an aircraft upon learning that it had alighted in the dreaded Triangle of Death.
That kind of disconnect with press coverage and the debate back home is a constant theme. The Senate recently passed a resolution sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), calling for splitting Iraq in three. A colonel here scoffs that the Senate managed to agree on the one step that basically no one in Iraq wants to take.
But these are just the stories of soldiers with dusty boots and the Iraqi people they’re working beside.
What do they know?
This disconnect between reality and political perception shows how out of balance our political process has become. We must lose in order for the Democrats to win and in order for them to secure political victory they will overlook anything that remotely resembles progress in Iraq. Nevermind that in doing so they dishonor their own soldiers and make their mission even more difficult.
wow, we got someone from the 10th Mountain to use the word “archipelago” in a sentence.
so we got that going for us.
which is nice.
MajMike, While I’m in total agreement with the general thrust of your comment… I think it’s an unfair, but sweetly snarkey, libel on the 10th Mountain…suggest in the future that comments of this nature , on this blog, would be more appropriate if directed at the Marines, a much juicier target, and not us Dogs …DAT’s forever. Best
And then there is the recent article in Newsday written by Tim Phelps that says that the entire region of Basra is in chaos…
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ny-wobrit095407183oct09,0,4190972.story
Tim Phelps, and his charming wife, were neighbors of mine in the late 1990’s. I heard them both speak at a small gathering for the League of Women Voters in about 1998. This was during the Clinton stock market go-go years where everyone was rich and the world was a happy place. After all, the Islamofacists had only bombed American offshore interests at that time… Oh, except the WTC part one…
They viewed the U.S. as an evil imperialist power back then! The ills of the world they laid at the feet of the U.S. Think about it, how far left do you need to be to condemn the U.S. during the Clinton admin. regarding intervention in other states???
Two greater nutjobs, I have yet to encounter.
So, while we have those trying to tell us the story in Iraq, we also have those with a national audience hell bent to tell us that everything we do is wrong.
Snake – You do my heart good!
I just got back from visiting my son in Pensacola. We went to poker night with him. This is frequented by a bunch of Marines of the copter variety. Yeah, no way could they use
“archipelago” in a sentence, being the ham fisted neanderthals that we all know they are… Funny how they can keep those birds off the ground! (And fly to support their brothers, God Bless Them) Kinda made me want to cry just being in their presence.
Luckily, there were two adorable dogs in the house. I let the knuckledraggers play their card game while I watched a football game and played with the dogs…
Hey! Don’t forget us civilians whom have volunteered to be here also. Some more than four years, which makes my 13 months look insignificant.
But I have met several hundred Iraqi’s, none of whom have wanted us to leave, just yet, if at all.