As an antidote to the consistently defeatest talking-head punditry of, say, Chris Matthews and his ilk, I think it useful here to excerpt a bit of Austin Bay’s evocative—though no less troubling (in that it points out the essential disconnect between the facts on the ground in Iraq and public perception in the US, a perception driven by an increasingly hostile media still enamored with its Vietnam / Watergate legacy of speaking Truth to Power)—Weekly Standard piece, “Nervous in Baghdad:  Do Americans have the will to stay the course?”:

[…] Success in the war on terror may strike New York Times readers and CNN viewers as a radically optimistic notion. The worst haters of America and its counteroffensive against terror–following the lead of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda’s man in Iraq, and Britain’s hard-left buffoon, George Galloway–acknowledge no conceivable measure of success. After all, they want America to lose. Every car bomb in Baghdad, they will say, just creates more terrorists, and America’s war on terror reduces to the soundbite “blood for oil.”

Galloway-Zarqawi critiques are the latest embodiment of anti-American themes with deep roots, dating back to Soviet Cold War propaganda. The connections ain’t theory. Terrorist organizations in the Middle East—the initial crop largely Palestinian—were armed and trained by the Soviets. The Soviets, in concert with Arab clients like Syria and Nasser’s Egypt, promoted the Arab-Israeli conflict as an American conspiracy. These Cold War Soviet sources of anti-Americanism receive scant attention, but they are the foundation of the jihadists’ information war, and fuel the conspiracy theorists at www.democraticunderground.org—cranks the Howard Dean wing of the DNC exploits for their money and votes. The bottom line for Galloway-Zarqawi types: Any event on the planet–real or imagined–that dishonest rhetoric can connect to either the United States or Israel always creates more terrorists.

[…] ON JUNE 23 CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid told a Senate hearing that the Iraqi insurgency was at “about the same” strength it was six months ago. “I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago. . . . We see good progress in both Iraq and Afghanistan . . . but we are realistic. And we know that great change is often accompanied by great violence.” I was still in Afghanistan, so I missed the general’s performance. The pictures I saw on the web show the burly, intellectual Abizaid as a cool and serious senior officer, a kaleidoscope of military ribbons draping his dress green uniform.

I did get to hear Abizaid on June 16, while waiting at the East Gate of the U.S. Marine base at Falluja. I was in Iraq again, this time with a note pad and camera instead of a pistol. My flak vest was a black police SWAT jacket, more svelte than the heavy, plated monster I wore last year while racing along Baghdad’s Route Irish (see “The Millennium War,” The Weekly Standard, January 3 / January 10, 2005). The temperature was approaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which didn’t bother me so much. Last year I’d humped Baghdad at 130. The dust, however, irritated me. Abizaid–wearing desert camouflage, a flak vest, and his 1st Ranger Battalion combat patch–looked thoroughly composed, displaying the earned gravitas of the superior combat commander who knows dust, gripes, mistakes, direct fire, and writers come with the job.

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. I had no idea what was coming. Then, I swear, I knew.

“The mood of how this war is going in Baghdad and Arab capitals is better than in Washington and London,” Abizaid said […]

[…] Why? I asked. Why is that? Why the rank negativism? We were standing under a camou net, waiting for the Iraqi police brigadier now charged with directing Iraqi security operations in Falluja. Abizaid had taken off his helmet, and passed it to one of his aides. “Here’s how I answer that. The Arabs see the Iraqis taking control of their own lives. And I see that. I see that every day. The fact is you have Iraqi leaders and soldiers who go out and face it [the insurgency] every day. The Iraqis have been fighting and dying at a rate three to four times greater than ours, so I wouldn’t sell them short.”

But what do you say to someone who says nothing has changed?

“The center of friction is now somewhere west of Baghdad. Last year I would have said it was Baghdad. It’s moved from Baghdad, west. Into Al Anbar” province, toward the Syrian border. “We’re squeezing them more and more. It’s clear from the intel that Zarqawi is under pressure. Al Qaeda is under pressure everywhere. The main problem [in Iraq] is the Sunni Arab community coming into the political process, and that takes patient military and political skills.”

Patient, he said. We have no patience, I thought. Washington, D.C., and cable news have no patience. Our own ridiculous, catered-to generation, General, has little patience for anything except capital gains, and maybe that’s too generous a statement. If the Big Mac is two minutes late, Boomers, be they left or right, get pissed. I thought that–but I didn’t say any of it. In part I didn’t say it because it’s not totally true. I know way too many exceptions–some who have wised up, and some who have borne the burdens of real-world responsibility and bad history from the get-go. So I didn’t shoot my mouth.

[…] On 9/11 al Qaeda demonstrated that what the World War I generation called “over there” is nowadays very close to “back here.” America–according to its enemies–is everywhere, but a computer keystroke finds al Qaeda, Chinese spam, Nigerian scams, North Korean agitprop, Bhutanese rug prices, and Sudan’s hideous genocide in Darfur. An airline ticket, a sick tourist, and 22 hours moves the Asian flu from Bangkok to Denver. The upscale phrase is “technological compression,” but the down-to-Earth 21st century fact is all of us live next door.

Unfortunately, many politicians and journalists still habitually live by 20th-century templates. Newsweek certainly thought “the snake’s there and we’re here” when it ran its notorious “Koran flushing” anecdote, sparking deadly riots in Pakistan. Two other templates were also in play then: the Vietnam and the Watergate templates. Vietnam and Watergate for three decades have provided the New York-Washington-L.A. media axis with convenient–if reductive–headlines. The Vietnam and Watergate rules are simple and cynical. Rule One: Presume the U.S. government is lying–especially when the president is a Republican. Rule Two: Presume the worst about the U.S. military–even when the president is a Democrat. Rule Three: Allegations by “Third World victims” are presumptively true, while U.S. statements are met with arrogant contempt.

When will the media figure this out: Al Qaeda and its cohorts are strategic information powers and little else. “The terrorists have yet to win an engagement above the platoon level,” Gen. Abizaid said as we flew from Qatar to Iraq. I mean, a C-17 is loud, but the man said it with exacting clarity. Terrorist bombs are made for TV, and terrorist beheadings are made for the Internet. Here’s a radical thought, politically incorrect, incorrect in terms of TV ratings but still strategically correct and correct in terms of defending liberal values: Winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately means curbing the terrorists’ strategic combat power, and that means ending the media magnification of their bombs.

I remember a very early morning in July 2004, still on active duty, when I realized this was the case. I walked into the coalition’s Joint Operations Center in Al Faw Palace, Baghdad, and took a seat in the back of the tiered amphitheater. A huge plasma screen draped the front wall, like a movie theater screen, divided into ceiling-high panels capable of displaying multiple computer projections. A viewer could visually hopscotch from news to weather to war. The biggest display, that morning and every morning, was a spooling date-time list describing scores of military and police actions undertaken over the last dozen hours. The succinct, acronym-packed reports flowed like haikus of violence: “0331: 1/5 Cav, 1st Cavalry Division, arrests suspects after Iraqi police stop car”; “0335 USMC vicinity Falluja engaged by RPG, returned fire. No casualties.”

The spool spun on and on, and I remember thinking: I know we’re winning. We’re winning because–in the big picture–all the opposition (Saddam’s thugs and Zarqawi’s al Qaeda) has to offer is the tyranny of the past. But the drop-by-drop police blotter perspective obscures that.

Collect relatively isolated events in a chronological list and presto: the impression of uninterrupted, widespread violence destroying Iraq. But that was a false impression, even in July 2004. Every day, coalition forces were moving thousands of 18-wheelers from Kuwait and Turkey into Iraq. If the insurgents were lucky they blew up one. However, flash the flames of that one rig on CNN and, “Oh my God, America can’t stop these guys,” is the impression left from Boise to Beijing.

Another memory of those days. I remember running into Col. Sam Palmer in the Al Faw Palace in May 2004. Sam served as the Corps’s C-9, in charge of Civil Affairs (economic assistance and civil-military relations). Sam looked tired–looked, heck, he was beat, with the dark rims of 20-hour days circling his eyes.

“Here’s one of the things a strategic policy guy like you, Austin, is going to see immediately. We’re whipsawed by the U.S. political cycle,” meaning the elections. “Somehow we’ve got to get a stable policy–something that will help see us through the economic and political development phases of this war.”

June 2005–back in the Al Faw Palace, this time for an interview with Lieutenant General John Vines, the commander of XVIIIth Airborne Corps. We’re in the corps commander’s office, on the second floor. Another reporter asks Vines the gut question: “The loss of national will. Does that [possibility] scare you?”

“Truthfully, yes,” Gen. Vines says. Vines had just briefed us on Operation Lightning, an Iraqi and U.S. effort in and around Baghdad. “At least half of that operation [in June] was planned and executed by Iraqi MOD [Ministry of Defense] and MOI [Ministry of Interior] troops, [operating] along with the 3rd ID [Third U.S. Infantry Division].” The Iraqi troops “coordinated. Believe it or not, bureaucracies in the United States don’t coordinate among themselves. The Iraqis have gone a long way to deciding who has [security] responsibilities in Baghdad. MOI has the lead inside Baghdad, MOD outside. . . . Iraqi tactical capability is adequate.” The issue is “their ability to sustain it.”

“The real measure is not military but political. The insurgency won’t be defeated through the barrel of a weapon but through a political process.”

Yes, I thought, and that’s also the only thing that can defeat America.

All in all, a remarkable piece.  Read the whole thing.

For my part, I think we in the US do have the will, but I despair each time I see people like Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen on national political talk shows presenting the War in Iraq as a lost cause—a prolonged and costly failure that, even should we manage to win and manage to establish an Iraqi democracy, that democracy will prove to be either rabidly anti-American, or else so weak that it will a puppet government propped up by imperial-minded American neocons looking for a military foothold in the region.

So, y’know:  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

At what point national Democrats became Nixon-era foreign policy realists I’m not quite sure (sometime after Clinton’s UN-unsanctioned adventures, presumably)—but I can’t help but harbor the feeling that their foreign policy conversion had something to do with Bush’s own, 911 having driven the President by intellectual and strategic necessity, in his mind, away from his “no nation building” campaign pronouncements and toward the intellectual position that the spread of democracy is the best offensive against radical islamism.