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Bringing Up BabyThe elusive balance between love and discipline.

Compiled by Adam ChristianUpdated Friday, Jan. 26, 2007, at 8:44 PM ET

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Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007

Christopher Hitchens' latest on Patrick Cockburn's account of the "calamitous mismanagement of the Iraq War" inspired a very detailed and thoughtful semantic parsing of the terms commonly used thus far to characterize the conflict.

For TJA, to call the war "mismanaged" overlooks the fact that "the initial idea was so flawed that such mismanagement was likely if not certain." cwg agrees that "the mismanagement, though disastrous, should be seen as secondary to the hubris and hypocrisy of the invasion itself, which was executed without significant political opposition or analysis by the MSM." By jerseyman's definition, however, all wars are inevitably mismanaged to some degree, making this criticism so broad as to be useless:

Every campaign, by every general; every war, by every nation; all of them have been an accumulation of errors, disasters and fiascos.

As the great Lombardi said of football: "the side that makes the fewest mistakes wins".

US forces, since the end of WW2, have been fighting under the twin burdens of politically correct rules of engagement and instantaneous criticism driven by electronic media 24 hour coverage.

Could the American Military "beat" the insurgents? For that matter could the US military wipe out the Islamic radicals? With a free rein and no concern for collateral damage I'd say obviously.

In place of concrete, measurable benchmarks of progress, the Bush strategy has been one of perpetual deferral, claims O_Hellenbach:

My particular favorite line in the administration's ongoing obfuscation and denial about the situation in Iraq is the one that goes, "the next three [or six] months will be critical." The idea that something is critical means that at the end of the period some kind of resolution has been reached, or some kind of result will occur or not occur that will allow somebody to make some kind of judgment about it. Yet it never does. The phrase simply becomes a way to put off answering any questions. Since the occupation began, we've passed any number of supposed critical three-month periods without comment or even any memory that somebody said that the critical period had passed--much less with any resolution or conclusion or evaluation.

Varian fires back forcefully at O_Hellenbach's "Are we there yet?" approach that

represents ... all the impatient, largely irrelevant questions which should be answered in [times of] war: "as long as it takes." You've bought into your own antiwar propaganda to an extent that you don't realize that people like Hitch think that friendly control over the key state in the Mideast and hanging what may be an insurmountable defeat on the jihadists is well worth a few years and a few thousand troops (as much as we regret the loss of each one). That's what some of us commit to when we support a war. We don't expect every war to be a 6-week air campaign followed by 100 hours of ground fighting before we declare "victory."

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