I think Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol both make excellent points against George Will’s preferred policy. Some of Will’s critics are bringing up the fact that Will was a strong supporter of the Iraq war and the Afghan war before abandoning both efforts. I don’t see the point of this line of attack. Will has drawn the lesson from the last decade that democracy is harder to export than he believed at the start of it. Maybe his conclusion is wrong. But what’s wrong with changing your mind?

I also think (as Kristol suggests) that the frustration Will expresses about the war is more widely felt than it is voiced in D.C. If the case isn’t forcefully made that the war is in the national interest and that something recognizable as victory can be achieved, it is going to lose public support. The president is making neither case.

Update: John Noonan has a terrific post on this topic: “The perception of hopelessness is precisely what a well-trained, dyed-in-the-wool insurgent strives to project. That’s how they win, by encouraging the notion that victory is an impossibility. . . . The COIN efforts that have failed in the past 40 years (and there are plenty), were — interestingly enough — the fights that were prosecuted according to George Will’s concept of operations.”