Victor Davis Hanson’s OpEd in today’s OpinionJournal is a brief and perfect description of what’s wrong with our public discourse on the GWOT. From At War With Ourselves
For many, Iraq is no longer a war whose prognosis is to be judged empirically. It has instead transmogrified into a powerful symbol that apparently must serve deeply held, but preconceived, beliefs–the deceptions of Mr. Bush, the folly of a neoconservative cabal, the necessary comeuppance of the American imperium, or the greed of an oil-hungry U.S.
Why are so many people obsessed with proving Bush & Co. wrong? Or, perhaps just obsessed with proving themselves right?
In sum, after talking to our soldiers in Iraq and our planners in Washington, what seems to me most inexplicable is the war over the war–not the purported absence of a plan, but that the more we are winning in the field, the more we are losing it at home.
This is a great read. The text is in the extended entry.
