Is This Our Valley Forge Moment?

David Brooks has another silly column today. It starts: "There's a reason George Washington didn't take a poll at Valley Forge." Hmm. This is a strange analogy to our current situation. It seems to me that G.W. was not really in our current situation at all. Indeed, in terms of military power alone, we are in the position of Lord Cornwallis, not G.W. I mean, we are the Great Power like Great Britain was (er, we are actually a SUPERPOWER, Fuck Yeah!); we are fighting a war overseas, against indigenous, irregular forces who are able to live off the land. Even the assistance of the French to the colonials reminds one of clandestine aid the insurgency receives from our enemies in the Middle East.

But the real point here is that rebels/insurgents/guerrillas measure success differently from superpowers. If a rebel movement can just keep going, scoring occasional P.R. victories and making the occupying power do things that undermine its support with the broader indigenous population, then the rebels can afford to lose every (or almost every) military engagement. Things can often look pretty bad, while the insurgents' trajectory is "upward." But a superpower can kill hundreds, thousands--is anyone else bothered by the constant references to bodycounts!--and still be on a downward trajectory. The key is whether the superpower is merely expending its power, week after week, month after month, for little or no gain. Dead bodies are not progress, no matter how one inflates the counts.

Body Count Brooks writes: "On the one hand, there are signs of progress. U.S. forces have completed a series of successful operations, among them Operation Spear in western Iraq, where at least 60 insurgents were killed and 100 captured, and Operation Lightning in Baghdad, with over 500 arrests."

But here's the kicker: "Others will say we shouldn't be there in the first place. You may be right. Time will tell."

Isn't that, um, backward? If it's true that "we shouldn't be there in the first place," isn't that obvious now, with the Downing Street Memo, the evidence of distorted intelligence on WMD, and so on? Isn't it clear that many of those who supported this war were misled into it? That this is all a big lie? We don't need "time" to "tell" us that?

As I blog this, breaking news about four car bombs in Baghdad today. Yeah, it's too early to tell. It's only been two years since the fall of Baghdad--a few car bombings every day, things are going swimmingly.