I think it's helpful, especially when dealing with Iraq and other big political issues, is to not lose sight of the realities of what's really going on. One of the reasons our debate here in the US on what to do in Iraq is so problematic is that much of it is untethered from realities on the ground there.
A lot of lefty people get frustrated with Michelle Malkin - in an ideal world, I wish she'd dial back her sarcasm and some of her more harsh rhetoric - but she's a well trained reporter, who prefers to deal in facts, and more than most bloggers strives for accuracy and accepts accountability. Malkin's been in Iraq the past couple of weeks, and she's begun posting her observations from there.
Perhaps even more useful is the essay by Bryan Preston, who works with her on Hot Air, the (more right thinking) video podcasts Malkin's helped to create. Preston's assessment of the errors in Iraq is surprisingly clear-eyed and forthright about mistakes made by the Bush Administration, a welcome candor when so many conservatives still defend much that is indefensible.
Both Malkin and Preston remain hopeful about turning things around in Iraq; I don't see it. Indeed, their descriptions of the day-to-day challenges facing soldiers and ordinary Iraqis says to me that things are in pretty bad shape. But I think their understandable hopefulness - the alternative view, that things are indeed so bad as to be hopeless is not something I think conservatives are prepared to face - is misplaced. I think Malkin's sense that things can turn around because some Shia and Sunnis want it to be so only works if you ignore the larger forces at play. All the good work she's observed - work, I'd argue, that's not ideally suited to an army - is detail work, not about big picture issues and larger forces in the society. I think many well meaning Iraqis want peace, but that's the way insurgencies and Civil Wars work - good people wind up, regretfully and reluctantly, having to choose sides. And everything I see makes me think that it's getting harder not to.
It's interesting that Malkin and Preston seem to have been embedded in a fairly peaceful part of Baghdad - they point out that the fairly routine patrols they went out on did not see explosions or much gunfire. Meanwhile, hundreds were killed while they were there. It would be nice to think that the areas Malkin and Preston saw were most representative and the violence was anomalous. I suspect the reverse is true - and that things will continue to fall apart. And despite Preston's attempts to loop the media into his failure narrative, what's going wrong in Iraq - the lack of a plan, the elections too soon, the poor understanding of what counterinsurgency can and cannot do - is about the failure of government, not of the media to somehow make those bad facts look better.
I think our failure to succeed in Iraq (not "win") has to do, ultimately, with our good intentions - as a nation born out of the failure of colonialism, America has always resisted being a colonizer. We want people to live free to have the independence we take for granted. And the problem is that a lot of people have no idea what we're talking about. And we don't have the stomach or the nerve to be, well, conquerers and colonizers. We will leave Iraq worse than how we found it because we are not enough of one thing (conquering) and too much of another (hands-off). The only question now is, given our reluctance to watch so many people suffer in a terrible Civil War - again, a sign of how we go at things with the best of intentions - is how we can extricate ourselves. There still are not a lot of good answers.
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