Making sense of now and the last 35 years.

J.R. Dunn has published an exceptional piece on American Thinker that makes clear that the Patraeus strategy is working big time and that, as in prior wars, a winning strategy can easily be preceded by painful military disasters. The left, however, expects perfection, minimal risk, and zero civilian casualties -- the vaunted "let no sparrow fall" approach to military operations.

His second point, is that the left wing is trying to drag us all down memory lane to the unnecessary pullout from -- and Congressional sellout of -- Vietnam. This includes an attempt to ignite a Watergate-like "scandal" under the rubric of Plamegate, like Woody Allen's lame attempt with the lobsters to recreate the joy of earlier times with Annie Hall.

Which failed.

That means a continuation of the surge, and of the strategy of General Petreaus. Will that be enough? It's impossible to say. But the past few months have been the most surprising in the entire Iraq saga to date. I have a feeling that Al-Queda (and the media, and the Democrats), will have a few more surprises coming in the months ahead.^[1]

Studying Mr. Dunn's piece and the resources he cites is the single best thing anyone can do to figure out what drove national policy from 1968 forward to the Democrats' own "Senate pajama party" as Mr. Dunn calls it. All of the resources cited by Mr. Dunn are now on our must read list, especially, Peter Braestrup's Big Story, which Mr. Dunn characterizes as "one of the most crucial -- and overlooked -- media studies ever to see print."

Unheralded Victory: The Defeat of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, 1961-1973, by Mark W. Woodruff, and Decent Interval, by Frank Snepp, are two other revisionist books that also tell the story of defeat's being stolen from the jaws of victory. By the Democrats.

In view of this history and the clear evidence that military victory in Vietnam was sold to Americans in the past as a military failure due to a reckless or irresponsible (even traitorous) press, it is imperative not to repeat this sad experience.

Until we are sure one way or ther other about the success or failure of our strategy, we simply must not repeat the precipitous and unnecessary withdrawal from Vietnam (and other places). Whether a better target than Iraq could have been chosen is irrelevant at this point. We simply must see the present decision through, and what we do do eventually must be founded on accurate assessments.

Which will not be found in today's TV and newspaper sources.

QED.

Notes
^[1] "The Surge Succeeds." By J.R. Dunn, American Thinker, 7/24/07.