[If] Iraq is viewed as a key jumpstart to the stalled spread of democracy in the Middle East, the establishment of liberal governance in a region dominated by dueling autocratic and theocratic ideologies will take significant time and effort, its difficulty augmented by hypercritical analysis incessantly focused on narrow narratives in lieu of strategic assessment. The media (Western and otherwise) exacerbates this tendency towards taking the short view, motivated by varying degrees of narrative laziness, ideological bias against the war, reporters' cynicism about domestic authority, and a market-inspired gravitation towards dramatic ledes.

Got it?

If you share this basic worldview, you're inclined to put up with a lot of bad news from Iraq. For one thing, you don't trust the press any longer; after umpteen Vietnam-inspired, premature declarations of "Quagmire!", from just before the stunningly successful victory in Mazar-e Sharif to the briefly stalled march to Baghdad, the hawk is desensitized to and inherently suspicious of negative war news. By crying wolf for dramatic or ideological ends, elements of the mainstream media have diminished its credibility among war-supporting cynics to a dysfunctional extent, and a hawk's reception of many of the legitimately troubling reports from the conflict dead-end at skepticism and narrative confusion rather than aiding real analysis and conclusion. We've developed an abnormally thick skin for negative news, and this sports both beneficial and harmful consequences for anyone interested in sussing out a relatively objective truth about what's going on over there.

In addition to a mistrust of the media's characterization of events, the Iraq Hawk has a core belief that the grand historical changes attempted via an invasion of Iraq call for - demand - time and patience antithetical to 24-hour news cycles and emotional analysis shared by politicians, legacy media and carping bloggers alike. If government policy has the handling characteristics of an oil tanker, the critical event is the captain's choice of where to point it, not how quickly it turns. Having made a choice of captain and course, chattering analysis perceived as unrealistic demand for speedboat-like performance becomes irritating background noise. A war critic sees this steadfast support as ignorance or cognitive dissonance. A war supporter views it as mature, requisite patience. Realistic analysis can be complicated by both sides being right.

Now that we've established the worldview and analytical tendencies of the "dead-end Iraq War supporter," also known as "me," an honest reassessment of the war requires stepping outside of comfortable narratives while avoiding seductive replacements.

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