XDA

Former Prime Minister of Iraq, Iyad Allawi, has said that the only way to describe the situation in Iraq is Civil War. In context, he was focusing on the civilian casualties (50 to 60 per day) and said there were no other words for that many internecine deaths. I guess he's right in a technical sense. I still remember Ralph Peters saying he's traveling around Baghdad and seeing children playing in the streets, not civil war. I still remain buoyed by that observation, but I believe that there were children playing in the streets of Washington DC and Richmond, VA in 1864. Those were different times though. I don't believe there were children playing in the streets of Beirut on Christmas, 1975 and the only children playing in the streets of Kinshasa on July 4, 1997 and in Monrovia on July 4, 2003 were carrying AKs and playing at shooting people.

George Will is gloomy (but that may be because we got whooped in international baseball). Chuck Hegel says we've already lost but we can't quit, the opposite of what I say. The Secretary of Defense is only marginally upbeat. Who am I to say those smart guys are wrong? So let's assume some of them are right; there's a low grade civil war going on in Iraq and a tough row for us to hoe just when were getting sick of the whole thing.

But we've been down before. Think of March, 1942. The Germans had an unbroken string of victories from France to the doorsteps of Moscow and Leningrad and had not yet faced defeat in Egypt or the turning of the tide at Stalingrad. The Japanese had expanded their empire at an amazing rate and we, the British, and Dutch had lost big to them everywhere they attacked, and we had not yet even launched the morale building airstrike led by Jimmy Doolittle or fought to the rough tie in the Coral Sea. My dad used to say that in his neck of the backwoods, people at that time would sometimes greet each other with 'Heil Hitler, in case we lose'. Although a tough time was ahead back then, we and the Soviets et al. went on to slaughter the Nazis and Imperial Japanese and it was a good thing we did. When did we begin to talk about giving up because it's hard? Jeez. I guess Viet Nam still is the model of defeat we embrace. I suppose I'm gloomy too, but our armed forces are so good, only we can defeat ourselves.

Christopher Hitchens made a good point on This Week; he said that freeing Iraq from horrible despotism and stopping and isolating al Qaeda in Iraq, and making them seem the bad guys they clearly are, would be worth all the effort, money and lives we've spent. Right.

UPDATE: I've thought about this more and I see that I've been caught up in the instant gratification thing again. Saddam Hussein looted the country at the expense of the infrastructure for a quarter century, we bombed them twice (and we're pretty good at that) and we expect them, within just three years, to be like Germany and Japan in 1955. Patience, my friends. If we don't quit, we (the Coalition and the Iraqis) will get there.