Dreaming I Am

I ran into this one this morning via the Dish, and, well:

But while Islamists may eventually hijack the popular outrage against authoritarianism, both secular and Islamic, for now one thing is at least clear. There will probably be no such popular violent unrest in Iraq where an elected and popular government is legitimate and where violence comes from small numbers of anti-democratic forces seeking to impose an intolerant dictatorship of some sort.

That's Victor Davis Hanson at NRO.  Where to start? Oh, forget it; I don't really like to pull up and ridicule crazed ideological statements, but really, does one even have to make an argument? Oh well -- I suppose I'd at least point out that if you define all violent unrest as "popular" if and only if it conforms to your views of what should be popular, it makes analysis easier. Albeit somewhat less useful, perhaps.


If you think that's totally divorced from reality, it's only the first paragraph. He continues:

Given that those in and about the Obama administration have long dropped their old narratives about Iraq (“lost,” etc.), given that there are presently no popular complaints at home against our many-thousands still in the country (e.g., mysteriously no more movies like In the Valley of Elah,Redacted, Stop Loss, no more Camp Caseys in Texas, no more courtship of Michael Moore), and given that it has become one of Obama’s “greatest achievements...

Let's see; why could it be that people have stopped complaining about Iraq? Sure is a mystery. Oh, wait: it couldn't be that George W. Bush negotiated a surrender there a few years ago, and that first Bush and then Obama have followed through. Could it? It also might have something to do with the 21 American troop deaths in Iraq over the last six months, as opposed to the five years beginning in spring 2003 in which 21 American troop deaths was a great month.  (And scroll down the linked page to notice the 200 Iraqi fatalities this month. Just saying). 


On the other hand, I suppose that I thought that the best thing that Bush could have done at the time was to declare victory and leave, so I suppose I can't really complain that there are people out there who believe, or at least pretend to believe, that Iraq was a great American victory.