Report

The President was positive in July; the GAO is negative now; "General Petraeus" will be cautiously optimistic in September. Fortunately or unfortunately, none of it means anything.

As is the habit of much of the Democratic-Party-aligned antiwar set, great import, if not great credence, is given to these various reports and plans and programs and studies. Every month or so, a new one provides an Aha! moment. Details are parsed; obfuscations are untangled; doublespeak is singly spoken. The idea is that through close reading, the details of these reports will substantiate factional claims about the nature of the Occupation. I can understand war supporters desperately seeking good news, but for the supposed antiwar set to waste its time on all this is folly.

Let's be conscious: The government that produces these reports--whether they're upbeat or downbeat in specific tone--is the same government whose military is currently an occupying power. That makes the reports useful as guides into the internal disputes in the Grand Court of Washington, but reveals nothing about Iraq itself. The GAO report finds "little progress" because the Iraqi government has "failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress." How this can be considered a meaningful metric of "success" or "failure" is beyond me. The benchmarks are arbitrary; the mandates are non-binding; and all of it is occurring in the halls of Washington. Good governance benchmarks dreamed up by our own dysfunctional legislature for application by a powerless government garrisoned and gaurded in an island fortress in the middle of a war zone aren't worth the newsprint they're repeated on. Reports on the "military success" of Escalation, meanwhile, are inevitably Archimedian: they relate only to displacement.

Opposing the war meaningfully requires a committment not to the premise that the war cannot succeed, but rather to the premise that the war itself is a grave wrong. Set aside complaints about "shifting definitions of success in Iraq." Why not be frank? Success in Iraq means the conquest and pacification of a foreign nation. Our opposition can't be grounded in the impracticability of this task. It must be grounded in the wrongness of the project itself, success be damned.