Samarra and Samarra and Samarra - Good stuff from perennially excellent bloggers on the most recent in a long line of victories in Samarra. Bruce Rolston provides a timeline of previous turning points. Meanwhile, Charles Dodgson, who has been providing appropriately skeptical commentary on the "War on Terror" pretty much as long as there's been a "War on Terror," sets Phil Carter next to Riverbend and listens for the overtones. You know what? Riverbend annoys the crap out of me. But that's because I'm an American. But you know what else? Riverbend isn't an American. That's kind of the whole point.

So. Is there any reason to believe that this particular famous victory in Samarra will prove more durable than previous ones? No. We've now established enough of a track record to assume that any given official statement is either: outright lies; spin; or wishful thinking. You have to construct the real thesis statement from incongruous asides deep in the supporting paragraphs of the Line of the Day. For instance, in an AP report from Tuesday, Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan

said "many" insurgents managed to escape from the city.

"We could have killed more, but we wanted to liberate the city," he said. "We will fight them if they don't come back to their senses."

The Philadelphia Inquirer picks up the theme today:

But they also said that there had been less fighting than they had expected and that the low total of 255 insurgents killed and captured during the three-day offensive suggested many fighters may have fled the city or gone into hiding rather than face the 5,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops who invaded last Friday.

Loyal readers, this is what guerrillas do: melt away under direct pressure and reform to return later or somewhere else. Nothing tangible has been achieved here. Meanwhile

As many as 1,200 U.S. troops will have to stay in the former insurgent stronghold of Samarra indefinitely to prevent the city from slipping back under insurgent control, Iraqi officials and American military commanders said yesterday.

That's one percent of our official in-country strength. I'm sure it's a much bigger percentage of our effective operational strength. Meanwhile, the US is still on the march, the New York Times tells us:

Among the first objectives that the operation achieved was to secure the Jurf Kas Sukr Bridge across the Euphrates. The bridge "is believed to be a favored corridor for insurgents moving into and out of key cities, including the capital hub and the current A.I.F. sanctuary of Falluja," the American military statement said. The military generally refers to insurgents and terrorists as Anti-Iraqi Forces, or A.I.F.

Exhuming the lede: a year and a half after toppling Saddam Hussein, we have to launch an offensive to secure (for however long) a major bridge within fifty miles of Baghdad, if I am reading the Times' inset map correctly. Will we station troops on the bridge permanently too? And how many bridges are there across the Euphrates.

We'll close with a reading from Victor Davis Hanson, historian and political analyst from the Andromeda Galaxy:

Critics of the near-flawless military campaign of three weeks were stymied when none of their bleak scenarios came to pass: thousands killed; millions of refugees; governments toppled; terrorist attacks in the United States; mass starvation; and hundreds of U.N. camps. Thus in a frenzied election year they have turned to two backup positions: reconstruction as "quagmire" and WMDs as the sole (and fraudulent) reason for war. Both strategies are risky because they presuppose that a year from now Iraq will be worse, not better, and that there will be no forthcoming textual or eyewitness reports that such weapons in fact were hidden, exported, or secretly dismantled as some goofy gambit of an unhinged dictator.

My emphasis. Column date, October 10, 2003.

UPDATE: Doh! Forgot the link to Charles Dodgson in the first version of this item.

Readers Unclear on the Concept - Tom Scudder writes to ask, anent the no historical comparisons except to Churchill principal,

So are you allowed to draw historical parallels comparing GWB to Churchill circa the Gallipoli campaign?

Tom, tell me your budget doesn't have a crucial line item for "Anticipated Freelance Income from NRO Articles." Because if you do, I foresee a shortfall.

Maybe Extremism in the Defense of Liberty is a Vice After All - Radley Balko has gone too far in his war against the food nannies. Actually eating poutine? Ewww!

I'll Be There - Lessons from the Iraq War: Reconciling Liberty and Security

Friday, October 22, 2004
8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

The Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001

Sign up for free at Cato's website. (Note: I don't mean I'll be on any panels, but I might hector some speakers from the audience. I mean, I might ask some questions from the floor.)

Via the Agitator.

Sacre Bleu! - George Bush. Dick Cheney. How . . . French.

My own counterexample would be Stalingrad rather than Verdun, but I suppose that would be comparing Bush to Hitler, and that would be shrill. And as Dave Intermittent says, "we're not supposed draw historical parallels that don't feature Bush starring in the role as Winston Churchill" anyway.

What Part of Trying to be AMUSED Don't You Understand? - Dave Trowbridge wants to get me all wound up about National Greatness impresario Marshall Wittmann endorsing John Kerry on "national greatness" grounds. Really, Dave, I've got my bonhomie to preserve here. Besides, you said what there is to say already.

Debateblogging II! - Wow. Even I was impressed by tonight as performance. The whole evening drove home - fringe politics cliche coming! - just how narrow is the philosophical chasm between our Authorized Left and our Approved Right. And more about this later. But the thing was a pleasure to watch. Dick Cheney, whom I despise for his policy choices, was a magnetic and gruffly appealing presence. He can make suppressed rage and evident disdain work for him in a way his lightweight boss of record can't carry off. There were times I remembered that I used to like him. (Not least when John Edwards recounted the things Cheney voted against in bygone years.) He's wrong - oh so wrong - about everything that is most important right now. But attractively so.

Edwards was tremendously engaging. Even when he was evading a point (he never did grapple with the Vice President's charge that he was dissing the contributions of the Iraqi security forces) or promising free ice cream for everybody (tax cuts for college tuition! shall we just add their value directly to everyone's actual tuition bills, send the money straight to the schools and save a step? there's got to be an efficiency gain there) he seemed warm rather than phony and enthusiastic rather than callow. If I am to have my finances mismanaged and my moral, political and military capital squandered in ill-advised boondoggles around the globe, these, by god, are the men I want doing it.

Who "won?" Entropy, my fellow Americans. The Democrats offer no challenge to the fundamentals of Republican foreign policy. Republicans no longer present any philosophical objection to Democratic economic policy. (Neolibertarians waited in vain for their tribune to object that, Hey! "Big Drug Companies" have done mankind far more good than harm, and have done so because they can make money doing it.) I am in possession of a wonderful letter from Loyal Reader Nell Lancaster, pointing out that the Republican Party is on record as far more gung-ho about torture than the Democratic Party. She says that will do for her, and I suspect she's made the right choice. But are you going to hear John Edwards or John Kerry raise the issue on the campaign trail? No, because one objecting to torture risks sounding "not tough," and they would rather clip the wires to their own nipples than do that. Funny how the issue never even came up.

Savor the memory of tonight, folks. Next week the assholes are back.

Read the Poor Man - It's important.

But I don't think I'm taking anything away from anyone's deep religious conviction when I point out that there are other motivating influences in people's lives, such as, for example, what comes to you as you carry the torn-up body of a girl (your daughter, your niece, your neighbor?) to stack on a waist-high pile of corpses, made by American bombs. This is the sort of motivating experience that has never been threatened by heresy, doubt or apostasy, that doesn't require ceremony or dogma or holy books, that has never had to bother with conversions or indoctrinations.

Three years after the September 11, 2001 massacres, there are still any number of Americans, not all of them warbloggers, who react with barely controlled fury to any suggestion that American policy may have played any causal role whatsoever in the atrocities of that day. Not "we deserved it" or "you can't blame the murderers" - just "government policies had a role in creating the conditions in which this happened." Most Americans don't want to hear one word of that kind of talk. What matters is that people like them got killed by people unlike them. We fool ourselves if we think the rest of the world is more introspective.