Two Wars

John Edwards yammered about "two Americas" during the campaign.

It's when you talk about the war that you really notice it. To fantasy-based America, we're well into another Vietnam via Auschwitz. To the rest of us, it's slow but steady progress.

Austin Bay is back in Iraq.

Over time, things are markedly improved:

"Metrics" is the military buzzword -- how do we measure progress or regress in Iraq? The piles of bricks around Iraqi homes is a positive. Downtown cranes sprout over city-block-sized construction projects. The negatives are all too familiar -- terror bombs and the slaughter of Iraqi citizens.

Last year -- on July 2, I recall -- I saw six Iraqi National Guardsmen manning a position beneath a freeway overpass. It was the first time I saw independently deployed Iraqi forces. Now, I see senior Iraqi officers in the hallways of Al Faw Palace conducting operational liaison with U.S. and coalition forces. I hear reports of the Iraqi Army conducting independent street-clearing and neighborhood search operations. Brigadier Gen. Karl Horst of US Third Infantry Division told me about an Iraqi battalion's success on the perennially challenging Haifa Street.

In February of this year, under the direction of an Iraqi colonel who is rapidly earning a reputation as Iraq's Rudy Giuliani, the battalion drove terrorists from this key Baghdad drag. Last year, Haifa Street was a combat zone where US and Iraqi security forces showed up in Robo-Cop garb -- helmets, armor, Bradleys, armored Humvees. Horst told me that he and his Iraqi counterpart now have tea in a sidewalk cafe along the once notorious boulevard. Of course, Abu Musab al Zarqawi's suicide bombers haunt this fragile calm.

Bay notes the real rub:

This return visit to Iraq, however, spurs thoughts of America -- to be specific, thoughts about America's will to pursue victory. I don't mean the will of US forces in the field. Wander around with a bunch of Marines for a half hour, spend 15 minutes with National Guardsmen from Idaho, and you will have no doubts about American military capabilities or the troops' will to win.

But our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial page of The New York Times, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C.

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Posted by Mitch at June 21, 2005 08:11 AM | TrackBack