American journalism has reduced the country's strategic tack on the Iraqi front to what sounds like the name of a soft drink, giving opinions to match, as with a shelf brand the metric of success is not potency but public reception.
President Bush's national address on Wednesday was bulleted: troop reinforcement, simplification of rules of engagement that soldiers both active and retired say are punctilious and ineffective, direct application of new rules to targets including the sordid rabble under Khomeinist agent Muqtada al-Sadr, better prevention of gangs from returning to infest cities and villages, recognition of and response to states in open warfare with the United States and Iraq.
At another point of recapitulation and review, one is reminded of the investment and dividend in Iraq. Today, the democracies are another country stronger. In so many years' time, Washington will have an able ally and trading partner that lies in the heart of what has been a malignant region of the world. Fascist states Syria and Iran contend with an old national adversary empowered not by familiar methods of coercion but popular will, and one that could soon gain enough strength to confidently construe paramilitary incursions as acts of war; and declare war, doing so, this time, in the name of the strange but irresistible causes of the Westerners. The ongoing struggle against totalism would shift, and remarkably.
Back in Washington, pessimism. Defeatists in Congress may not quite have momentum or a unanimous majority but are within reach of both. Missing, as always, from the justification for retreat is substance. Iraq, listening to the opposition, is supposed to disappear when the last soldier leaves — what happens to the country or the people is irrelevant to extrication. The act of gifting the enemy with a mostly industrialized country is accepted as incidental. Would defeatists trade a fledgling democratic government for an earnestly authoritarian or totalitarian one? Evidently, since they want to try to compromise with the uncompromising regimes in Damascus and Tehran.
Denied the comfort of certitude, skeptics must at least accept George Bush's gamble as the one means to produce new and advantageous circumstances. Here is a choice between the unprecedented, hard to attain; and the intolerable, which shall be gotten easily enough because it is already nascent. Persistence or resignation, and in this case failure of the first would be the same as the natural outcome of the second.