Dear America: Your Cold Shower Is Ready

A New York Times op-ed piece this week by Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack stating that the U.S. is finally making progress militarily in Iraq has gotten enormous coverage – and deservedly so.

I offer two overarching and interrelated observations pertaining to it:

First, the response to the piece by the Brookings Institution braniacs puts the lie to the notion flogged by conservatives and right-wingers that many liberal and left-wing commentators want the U.S. to be humiliated in Iraq.

While there is always the lunatic fringe, this assessment couldn’t be more wrong.

As someone who initially supported the war, I believe that I speak for many people in saying that I feel great enmity for President Bush and his harem of dangerous hacks – Cheney, Rove, Gonzo and Condi come easily to mind, and Rummy and Wolfie will not be soon forgotten. My heart breaks anew with every American death in Iraq, which easily is the most disastrous foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.

These harsh views do not translate into wishing ill for the troops. Quite the contrary. Which is why I briefly felt a surge (pardon the term) of optimism as I read the O’Hanlon-Pollack piece.

But that feeling quickly passed because, secondly and ultimately most importantly, the piece exhibited a rather shocking myopia.

While there does seem to be some movement on the battlefield, that situation is not playing out in an hermetically sealed environment, and there was but one passing reference in the entire piece to the other major conflict in Iraq – a deeply dysfunctional central government obdurately unwilling to work for sectarian reconciliation.

As even General Petraeus, the architect of the modest battlefield successes, has said, there cannot be a military victory without a political victory. The former remains highly unlikely; there is zero chance of the latter.

Photograph by Agence France Presse