JW,

I followed your link to PI's post and I can't say I'm surprised to find this is what he thinks of the "bad news in Iraq".

"As near as I can tell, though, a lot of them have basically given up and are already setting the stage for Phase 2: figuring out a way to blame liberals and the press for the fiasco in Iraq even though George Bush and his team have been in charge of every single detail of it and have gotten every single dollar they've asked for. I can't wait."

He can't wait. Says it all.

Yeah. And they only talk to each other. They pass the bad news back and forth until they are convinced by their own propaganda. I'll bet the possibility that we are planning to succeed and take all the credit hasn't even entered his nightmares yet...

I was about to correct your Latin, but fortunately checked it first. You’re right, I’m wrong...

Anyway: I believe that you believe things are succeeding in Iraq. I believe that you are going to claim credit when it works. What I don’t understand is why you can’t believe that others honestly believe that things are about to fall apart. From where I am sitting, things are about to do exactly that...

From where I am sitting, it looks like this whole Iraq war is a spectacular failure, one I am sorry to have supported. At the time, I justified my support by thinking (and writing) that Bush wouldn’t actually completely neglect the post-war peacekeeping. The horrid way he seems to have gone about doing things though suggests that he did exactly that. By this time next year, if we hand Iraq back to the Iraqis, I’m betting on civil war. Of course, if we don’t hand things over to them on 30 June... That would be bad...

Either way, a cockup...

Time will tell.

For what it's worth I attended a lecture/book signing by Bernard Lewis on Monday. He remains confident that some semblance of democracy will emerge in Iraq. He also seems confident that the U.S. will receive no credit for it.

Andrew,
Where are you sitting? What is the success-standard you are comparing to? A number of totalitarian regimes have fallen in recent decades and ALL of them have had very serious problems getting back on their feet and extablishing governments. ALL of them were far more dilapidated than they looked from outside. Why should Iraq be different?

And how can you say we've neglected post-war peacekeeping? I blog tales like the one above all the time, and there's TONS more stuff like that. That's post-war peacekeeping. Just because you don't see it on TV doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

And I read a number of Iraqi bloggers. They are not talking civil war. What info do you have that they don't? (and they are also not too upset about Abu Ghraib.)

And Al Sadr's rebellion has fizzled out, and Falluja has become fairly quiet. Those were the big bad-news items last month. So why isn't improvement on those fronts good news?

Maybe you have an unrealistic view of how hard and ugly war is. General Washington watched from across the Hudson, as surrendering Americans in New York were put to the sword by Hessian troops. And retreated with an army that had shrunk to a tenth of what it was a month before. Now that's spectacular failure!

From where I am sitting, the new Iraqi army walked off its job when the uprising happened. From where I am sitting, we had to turn Falluja over to one of Sadam’s generals to keep it quiet over there. From where I am sitting, the Exiles played us for fools-- on behalf of Iran...

Hell, from where I am sitting, Tom Clancy (of all people) thinks things are going poorly...

That's a good example of filtering out good news. In Mosul, the exact opposite happened from Falluja. Read this post.The army did NOT walk off the job. Iraqis, under Iraqi leadership, handled demonstrations and terrorist attacks without US help. But that's not NEWS. No one notices.

But it should be news. That's where things are trending. (From where I'm sitting) All the Iraqi bloggers I read say the IP is getting better. It's a slow difficult process, but it's happpening. And that means the jihadis and the Baathists are doomed. Iraqis all look alike to us, but they don't to other Iraqis.

And the news never mentions that Falluja is a unique place--even Saddam never had it under control. Pretending Falluja is the norm is silly, but very convenient for you Democrats.

And that general was a big shock to the Shi'ite religious leaders, and helped prod them to turn against Al Sadr. But that's not news. And the general is helping pacify Falluja, but he doesn't own the city--Falluja still has a city government. Using the general was an awkward improvisation, but it worked.

"From where I am sitting, we had to turn Falluja over to one of Sadam’s generals to keep it quiet over there."

Your statement is filled to the brim with factual errors, which makes one wonder exactly where you are sitting.