Domestic debate over war detached from reality

Rich Lowry:

A war has probably never been so debated and so little understood as the one in Iraq. "The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we're doing here," says one U.S. officer, in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact.

This is the lonely war. No one cares about it as much or understands it as well as the men and women here on the ground, who feel -- understandably -- that they are the only ones even remotely engaged in the fight.

The U.S. government has never brought to bear its resources in a truly national effort to win; the State Department has left almost the entire nonmilitary aspect of the war to the military; the Pentagon's slow-moving procurement program has an internal clock still set to peacetime; the top brass worry more about relieving the strain on the ground forces than achieving success on the ground; and the Bush administration hasn't been willing -- until too late -- to begin to provide a bigger force that would relieve that strain.

On top of this are the members of Congress and senators who show up for visits that seem more about saying they have been to Iraq than truly grappling with the war; the journalists whose reports tend to reflect whatever is the conventional wisdom about the war back in their newsrooms; and supporters and opponents of the war who support their clashing narratives of victory and defeat with the gross simplifications.

The word that one hears again and again here, but is so rare in the domestic political debate, is "complex." The war is changing at least every six months, and every area of the country -- even every neighborhood in Baghdad -- has a different dynamic. An officer at Forward Operating Base Justice in northwestern Baghdad explains that one translator who works there has to take three or four different taxis to get to the base, with a different faction ready to kill him from neighborhood to neighborhood.

...

South of here in the rural Sunni area known as the "Triangle of Death," there are 137 tribes and subtribes -- what an officer of the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 10th Mountain Division calls "an archipelago of complex societal islands." We have begun to master them. The tribes have produced thousands of volunteers to police the area, and violence has plummeted. But the story hasn't gotten out. Troops laugh about a reporter who refused to get off an aircraft upon learning that it had alighted in the dreaded Triangle of Death.

That kind of disconnect with press coverage and the debate back home is a constant theme. The Senate recently passed a resolution sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., calling for splitting Iraq in three. A colonel here scoffs that the Senate managed to agree on the one step that basically no one in Iraq wants to take.

...

The military has been much better at adapting to the situation than the civilians. The addition of anthropologist to the war team has "transformed" the battle in Iraq in a positive way. The State Department could probably use a dose too.

One of the reasons it is so important that we win this war is that by demonstrating that we can defeat an enemy that fights like al Qaeda we make it less likely that an enemy will use a similar strategy and tactics in the future. If we can make adversaries believe that resistance is futile and their chances are hopeless we will be faced with fewer wars in the future. That is one of the things that is so self defeating about the Democrats' desperation for defeat.