THE headlines today-“Iraqi Factions Seek Timetable For U.S. Pullout”-encourage another look at the Iraq situation, focused not on the desolation of the enterprise, but on the planks of despair. Is it really true that the Sunni and the Shiites are making common cause? Indeed, the report in the New York Times tells of 100 Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish leaders who have signed a statement in which “a withdrawal of foreign troops” is demanded “on a specified timetable, dependent on an immediate national program for rebuilding the security forces.”
A learned observer writes about that which he classifies as “increasingly surreal.” “I find, about discussions of Iraq, two universes of discourse, parallel but not contiguous. When I talk to one set of friends and acquaintances or read what they write, I get one version of what is going on. When I talk with another set, or read what they write, I get an entirely different and incompatible assessment. If you talk to military affairs specialists like Victor Davis Hanson, or political analysts like David Pryce-Jones, you get the sense that immense progress has been and is being made both in getting rid of the terrorists and in establishing a workable society in Iraq.”
Comments