Success in Iraq?

Newsweek reports that “Some intelligence officials even interpret the recent bombings of Iraqi police stations and military posts as a positive sign. Successful attacks are just dumb luck, they argue, and the high casualty figures merely reflect the fact that growing numbers of Iraqis are putting their lives on the line against the insurgency.”

So, why am I not encouraged? Well, if attacks were down the neo-con intelligence officials who see this as good news would also see that as good news too. They see only good news, and that’s been true ever since they told us the Iraqis would welcome us with flowers and the oil revenues would pay for the war. It didn’t happen.

“‘The administration can stomach television images of Iraqis getting killed,’ says a former administration official who had a key role in Iraq policy. Images of American dead in comparable numbers would be quite another story. The war's approval rating is bad already.” continues Newsweek, “If it gets much worse, any other gauge of the counterinsurgency will seem irrelevant.”

And that’s the problem – there is no gauge of the counterinsurgency, there is no ruler to measure if we’re being successful or not, everybody has their own opinion on how to do that.

Perhaps these analysts are correct and we are making a lot of progress, but at this point we really don’t know just how we’re doing. And that will depend on how the Iraqis react to what their new government is doing. And, let’s face it, there will be a problem in Iraq if the images of Iraqis getting killed continues unabated for a long time. If these sort of attacks are continuing in the fall, we’ll know that these intelligence officials who are proclaiming this as good news were just desparately grasping at straws.