Winning the Battles, but...

Some people seem to believe that the military victories we're collecting in Iraq is enough to make it free, but as Slate's Phillip Carter notes, you still need the component of political progress. In other words: our troops' presence in Iraq has as much to do with the successes (or failures) of the Iraqi government than it has to do with killing insurgents.

But this point -that the Iraqi government needs to start pulling it's own weight- is getting lost in the new fad for talking Iraqi policy: go there for about a week and then come back claiming that you're an expert.

Everyone is becoming so concerned about who the "expert" is that fewer and fewer people are actually discussing what needs to be done (which is why the options have boiled down to "cut and run" versus "stay the course").

As Carter puts it:

Truth is elusive in Iraq; it always remains just out of focus. In Iraq you can find evidence on the ground to support just about any conclusion you choose; most visitors arrive, see what they want to see, and go home believing even more strongly in the positions they held before they landed in Iraq. It takes months—perhaps even years—to gain the depth and perspective on Iraq necessary to develop a reasonably objective and balanced understanding of events there. Neither O'Hanlon and Pollack nor conservative scholars like Fred Kagan, the intellectual architect of the current surge, spend nearly enough time in Iraq to understand its shifting, uncertain realities.

We need to start getting real information about what's going on there, not bloated tours and book reports. We need to be hearing from people who have talked to soldiers from every region, and the Iraqi officials, and the Iraqi military, and the Iraqi civilians (the one group that gets overlooked the most).