The War? It's Very Much Fantastic.

The NYTimes is running an op-ed today from the Brookings Institute that proves that not much has changed among the Liberal Hawks that sunk us in Iraq in the first place.  Are we any closer to victory?  Not necessarily...

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily "victory" but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

How cute is that?  We already achieved the "victory" of removing Saddam from power and eliminating the threat of WMD proliferation from his government.  The good folks at The New Republic and the Brookings Institute already celebrated that victory on an aircraft carrier with President Flyboy And His Stuffed Pantalones.  Lacking an exit strategy, they're moving on to find the next victory or if that fails then they need to find that next sustainable metric that will stabilize and pacify their donors.

But I'm ignoring the fact that "we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq."  Guess what, Ma?  This war's packin' it's bags for the big city and movin' on up in this world! 

So what's working in Iraq?  Well, supposedly the Iraqis are rejecting Al Qaeda.  You've heard of them, them's those angry folks that Bush is always talking about.  Evidently the Iraqi folks weren't really exposed to Al Qaeda before and now they are rejecting them.  Hooray for Progress!  We're kinda sorta back to where we were when we started!  And we're helping to provide basic services that the people of Iraq used to have!  Now that's sustainable stability that everybody can enjoy!  (*Providing that you aren't one of the million+ displaced.)  Oh, and it appears that people that once lived as neighbors are kinda sorta actin' like neighborly folks again... except when they're killing each other. 

When can we expect to achieve this "sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis can live with"?  Well, let's not try to come up with a timetable for that one.  And to be honest, we will eventually mark this down a bit lower.  We just want to produce the image of a sustained stability that the Iraqis can theoretically live with and that we can use for cover before getting the heck out of town.  And then when Iraq becomes a failed state in five, ten, or twenty years we'll read articles in The New Republic (now sponsored by The Brookings Institute!) about how we left Iraq in a state of sustainable stability but those folks didn't want to work hard enough to keep it.