Of course, Michael O’Hanlon spent a week in Iraq and says these guys are wrong:

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

Obviously, the other side of this debate is going to be able to produce its own group of soldiers to back them up, but the basic claim these guys are making is more logical than factual: “Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population.” As they say, it’s simply implausible on its face to think that better tactics and an increase in the level of troops from way, way, way fewer than history deems necessary for this sort of thing to way, way fewer than history deems necessary for this sort of thing could reverse the fact that the US troop presence lost the support of the population years before the surge began.

Brookings’ dynamic duo says the surge should be continued “at least into 2008,” while Greg Djerejian discovers Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno in Baghdad saying “we all know” the surge forces will start leaving “in the beginning of 2008.”

Commenter Roger picks up on something I’d noticed but not commented on: “Thus, [Gideon] Rose thinks it is a knock me down proof of the wrongness of the criticisms of the clerisy leveled by Greenwald, et al., that … criticisms have also been leveled by … the neo-cons! Both sides have criticized the foreign policy establishment!” Indeed. This argument pops up in a surprising variety of places, and it truly seems like the last resort of the damned.

In the real world, after all, anyone who gets criticized at all ends up getting criticized “by both sides.” Just because you’re a liberal blogger like me doesn’t mean there aren’t other bloggers out there who are further to the left and willing to criticize me. And yet, not everyone who’s not as far right as one might be but also not as far left as one might be can simultaneously all be correct.

Meanwhile, this line of thought prejudices analysis of future issues. If the criteria of sober-minded sensibility is that both sides’ partisans think you’re wrong, then you’ve preemptively excluded from consideration the possibility that one side might ever be correct. So no matter how true it may be that the current conflict with Iran has been cooked up by some mix of Bush administration blundering and Bush administration malignancy, one can’t simply say that because then liberals won’t complain. So you need to exhort liberals to take the threat more “seriously,” get yelled at, and then go home feelings very sensible.

John Edwards is saying in the debate that the differences between the Democrats on Iraq are small. That’s certainly something I’d like to believe, since the people who have positions on Iraq I agree with — Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich — aren’t people I particularly want to see as president and aren’t people with a good chance of winning. But I don’t really think Edwards is right. It’s true that the Democrats all, in some sense, want to end the war in Iraq, but these plans to leave tens of thousands of residual forces won’t in fact end the war.

Richardson and Kucinich seem to clearly be saying they’ll end the war. Clinton and Biden are clearly saying the war will continue. I think Edwards is essentially in agreement with Clinton, but that’s not totally clear to me. Obama, meanwhile, seems to consistently succeed in ducking this debate in favor of returning to his other foreign policy points.