This Karen DeYoung article in today’s Post leads off on a really weird note:

Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of “occupying forces” as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.

That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some “shared beliefs” that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war.

DeYoung goes on to provide an excellent description of military efforts to assess the state of Iraqi public opinion and to explain what we know about it. But the big mystery here concerns the official analysis cited here in the second paragraph. In particular, it this silly, implausible spin or is this project being overseen by idiots? There’s just no way you could construe widespread, cross-sectarian belief that the departure of US forces is crucial for national reconciliation as supporting a policy of a decades-long American military involvement in Iraq.

You very well might characterize this as “good news” since it indicates that there’s at least some chance that a program of withdrawal would boost political reconciliation, but it’s certainly not “good news” for the policy we’re actually pursuing.

Meanwhile, it’s a reminder that the policy we’re pursuing is unlikely to accomplish its nominal goal of creating a stable, democratic government for Iraq. Basically, that objective is incompatible with the objective of sustaining the mission in Iraq. Insofar as the Iraqi government is responsive to public opinion, it will ask our troops to leave.

As someone who’s much better-informed about the war in Iraq than I am about the Vietnam War, it’s been interesting to chart the shifting valences of the war of analogies. Initially, many war opponents were inclined to analogize Iraq to Vietnam, and conservative hawks were prepared to concede the point about Vietnam (at least ad arguendo) and dedicate their energies to the proposition that “Iraq’s not another Vietnam.” At some point, however, it switched and the right started making the Vietnam analogies; this time, though, using the revisionist account of Vietnam in which we were winning the war but cowardly liberals pulled the plug. Thus you started to get things like Bill Kristol waxing enthusiastic that “Bush has the good fortune of having finally found his Ulysses S. Grant, or his Creighton Abrams, in Gen. David H. Petraeus.”

All of which is by way of introducing an excellent new essay on the subject by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson in Democracy where they argue that, no, Vietnam wasn’t winnable after all and that the impulse to keep hanging on only made the eventual outcome of the war worse than it needed to be. There’s also a good brief discussion of Northern Ireland analogies up near the top.

I apologize for the extreme length of this post, but the determination of various people to mislead the public about their pre-war stances on Iraq seems to me to require Greenwald-esque post lengths to try to document. At any rate, it would be a lot easier for me to forgive the Democratic Party politicians and prominent operatives who helped sell the country on George W. Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq if they would at least ‘fess up and admit that they supported a war that they very clearly did succeed. Here, for example, is former UN Ambassador and top Hillary Clinton advisor telling an audience in New Hampshire that Clinton voted for the war as a way of preventing the war:

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