I just ran across this Marine's blog post from April, in which he paid me a high compliment by linking here. I'll excerpt it, though you absolutely should read the whole thing:

when i returned from iraq, i really had no desire to talk about my experience and my opinion of the war, and to a large extent, that feeling has remained. this isn't because i suffered traumatically and just the sharing my experiences conjures up terrifying memories which haunt me at night. quite the contrary. i've had a couple dreams where i've woken up in cold sweats, but i think that's just a natural occurrence from being in a stressful environment to a more "relaxed" or inane environment where the biggest dilemma you face for the day is what you'll be having for dinner. but its been over a year that i've been back now, in fact its been a year and two weeks, and many of those feelings have become a little diluted and normalcy has returned to my life where i too ponder on what to eat.

today, i read an article that instantly brought me back to April 2006. how i felt after i got off that bus and saw my family. how nervous i felt driving a car so close to others, after training myself to keep a distance from unknown vehicle for fear of bombs and other deadly threats. i remembered how it felt being approached by the ones i love, answering the same question of, "so... how was it?", struggling to verbalize all of my emotions into words that they could understand, and realizing that it was impossible. but i understood that they asked me to empathize with me and share the burden of my experiences, to lighten my load and help me release any feelings or emotions that i had concealed in order to stay alive. although unable to truly explain my experiences, I found comfort in their love and how they tried to understand.

a few days later, my buddies took me out to one of my favorite places to eat where they sell over 30 different flavors of buffalo wings. i had talked about this place for months with my friends in iraq, and i was extremely excited to go. when the waitress came by, I was the last to order, in which I ordered what I had always ordered at the place with 30 varieties, 2 dozen buffalo flavored wings. after i had ordered my beer, she asked for my id, and since i was still using the wallet that i had used in iraq, my military id was the easiest to pull out. she saw it, verified my age, and said,
"oh so you're in the military."
"yeah" i replied
"so did you go to iraq?"
"yeah, actually, i just came back 2 days ago"
"oh really? so, how was it? cause i hear it's so horrible over there. that stupid bush and this stupid war"
"umm, actually, i'm very proud of what i did in iraq. we did a lot of very good things for the iraqis"
"oh well, my friends in the army say it was horrible"
"well, i can't speak for the army, but i'm a Marine, like i said, i'm very proud of what we did"
"oh well, thats cause you're a Marine, and Marines are crazy. my friends in the army say they had to shoot innocent people and kill them all the time"
"well... okay. i'm sorry about that..."
"okay... well i'll go get you your drinks now"
and she left.

think about this. i realized that this person, who had absolutely NO idea of what i had experienced, no idea of who i was, only began this conversation with me because she had assumed that my experience was horrible as her so called army friends claimed. in her mind, there was no other answer that I could have given other than the horror story that she expected, otherwise, why in the world would a waitress start a political question that dealt with the war, with a guy who just got back? she didn't ask me "how was it" for empathy reasons. she didn't ask me to share my burden or to comfort me and the horrific experiences that she assumed i had. she asked me only to confirm her opinion. she asked me only so that i could stroke her own ego and her belief that bush was evil, that the war was wrong, that people are dying for no reason, etc. and when i go against that view, well, it's cause i'm a crazy Marine who kills babies.

since then, i've been shy about speaking of my experiences, because it would only enrage me, not because of their close mindedness and the utter inability to have a normal conversation without preconceived notions that they established by watching whatever news/comedic outlet, but because they enjoy body count. they secretly enjoy when my brothers get killed, why? because again, it reconfirms how oh so right they are. that girl wanted me to go into detail about how my friends had died, and how i was so scared of dying for people i didn't care about. she wanted me to describe all the horrible things that i had encountered, all the pain and suffering that i felt and the those around me had felt, not because she empathized, but because "bush is evil.... i'm right, right? right? right? tell me i'm right."

Read the rest.

PS - Frankin Foer: I hear you've got a writing position open ... how about publishing that perspective?

Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of Brookings write an op-ed in the NYT:

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration's critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily "victory" but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Pollack is a serious thinker and author of both The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq and The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (highly recommended). He was a heavily equivocating supporter of initial invasion and an early critic of the post-war planning and execution. To various individuals it's relevant that he's a former CIA analyst and a Clinton-era NSC staffer. Having read the two aforementioned, exhaustively detailed books, I have a lot of respect for his opinion.

(Via Hot Air)

UPDATE: Dean Barnett (among others, no doubt) characterizes Brookings as a "hard left" institution, which would add Nixon-to-China credibility to the op-ed. I often like Barnett's writing, but he's enthusiastically off in that description. It's fair to say that Brookings falls left of center, but labeling it (and by extension, the authors) "hard left" is inaccurate and diminishes both analysis of the op-ed and the definition of "hard left" itself.

That said, it's still notable that such serious, high-profile critics of the war's execution see progress now.

UPDATE: And to err on the side of caution, Joe Klein brings up a good point:

I agree with many, but not all, of the conclusions Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon reach in this NY Times column, but you really can't write a piece about the wae in Iraq and devote only two sentences to the political situation, which is disastrous and, as Petraeus has said, will determine the success or failure of the overall effort.

Tabling Klein's decision to use the word "disastrous," any military gains are indeed just buying time and space for political progress. My guess is that O'Hanlon and Pollack assumed the reader might know that.

UPDATE: And we must note the inevitable and predictable Glenn Greenwald pushback on the op-ed, where he seeks to undermine the credibility of the authors by painting them as "yes-men." He starts with quotations of an interview done with O'Hanlon in 2003, where the analyst asserts that the counterinsurgency is going "fairly well" and minimizes the violence. Problematically for Greenwald, at various times the Iraq war has gone better than others - the bombing of the Al-Askari Mosque in 2006 being the real turning point for the road to hell-in-a-handbasket - and this Greenwaldian ignorance of context (sometimes willfull, sometimes not) sets one's teeth grinding. The descent of the policy was not irrevocably obvious in the first year of the occupation, except to those who had predetermined Iraq's fate as a hellish one spurred by US intervention.

And Pollack (one half of what Greenwald refers to as the "war cheerleading pair,' despite the Salon post's focus on O'Hanlon) did levy criticisms in 2004:

Mourning After: How They Screwed It Up

The primary cause of our current problems in Iraq is the reckless, and often foolish, manner in which this administration has waged the war and the reconstruction. For that reason, when I think back to the prewar debate, the thought that nags at me most is that I, too, should have foreseen what Bill Galston did—that the Bush administration would not fight the war properly. It looms in my thinking as something that probably could have been known before the war and that, had I recognized it, might have led me down a different intellectual path.

Pollack also addressed the tendency of war critics to pre-emptively assume Iraq a failure in late 2006: **

It never had to be this bad. The reconstruction of Iraq was never going to be quick or easy, but it was not doomed to failure.[1] Its disastrous course to date has been almost entirely the result of a sequence of foolish and unnecessary mistakes on the part of the United States.

Perhaps at some point in the future, revisionist historians will try to claim that the effort was doomed from the start, that it never was possible to build a stable, let alone pluralistic, new Iraq in the rubble of Saddam Hussein's fall. However, that is decidedly not the view of the experts, the journalists covering the story, or the practitioners who went to Iraq to put the country back together after the 2003 invasion.

What follows is a scathing critique of the Administration's execution of the war. Other criticisms were levied in Slate's "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War.' The fact that Pollack aggressively recognized and publiclized failures in Iraq lends at least some credibility to his caveated change of heart today. No matter what Greenwald's automated rebuttal template injects into the debate.

UPDATE: Dave Price:

Gleen's [Greenwald's] target audience has always been those easily fooled by weak arguments, or, dare I say, exercises in deceit. In 2003 and early 2004 most observers thought the effort was going well; we had, after all, just removed the regime in a three-week campaign. You can find approving noises from nearly everyone right of Cindy Sheeham in this time period; enthusiasm was so high Ted Kennedy accused Bush of "cooking up" the war "for political gain," which seems pretty laughable today. Approval for Bush's handling of Iraq was as high as 75% in 2003 and as high as 55% in early 2004, then trended downward as most observers, including the Brookings guys, took increasing violence as an indication the effort was not going very well; up until that point, what complaints there were generally centered around the lack of WMD and failure to capture Saddam. So it's hard to accuse Brookings of being overly sympathetic to the war effort on that basis.

** Note: I don't necessarily agree with Pollack's assessment that the war's "disastrous course to date has been almost entirely the result of a sequence of foolish and unnecessary mistakes on the part of the United States." The decrepit state of Iraq's civic institutions and spirit were more of a factor, though I agree that the post-war plan seriously screwed up the attempt at pacification and reconstruction. The point of the link - that Pollack has criticized the conduct of the war - remains, however.

Michael Totten heads out on a night raid with the 82nd Airborne:

"Four more to west," said a soldier. "They're running."

This time I could see them - four men rounding a corner and running away down a street. They were more afraid of us than we were of them.

"Does this kind of thing happen around here a lot?" I said to Eddy.

"It happens," he said.

Read the rest.

"As anyone can plainly see, I'm 5-6 1/2 and a strapping 150, and unlike some people, I came by all of it naturally."

You and me both Bob, you and me both. Heh.

Bruce Kesler features former POW Mike Benge's review of "Rescue Dawn:"

If I were inclined to have nightmares, "Rescue Dawn" would have given me some bad ones; luckily I'm not. I wasn't a pilot like Dieter Dengler; but I shared similar experiences as a civilian POW. For once, Hollywood got it right thanks to Herzog who captured the blood, sweat, tears, fear, emotions, hunger, the steaming and unrelenting jungle, and the fragility of man under the degrading and filthy conditions of POWs in the jungle camps of Indochina.

Between this endorsement and Herzog's impressive curriculum vitae, it sounds like a must-see.

"The only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into a Lebanon - or Bosnia-like maelstrom," a new report from the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution concludes, "is 135,000 American troops." Rapid withdrawal, the report says, could bring "a humanitarian nightmare" in which "we should expect hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die."

Link.

At the start of his trip to Iraq, Michael Totten captures a couple of things really well: the endless suck that is military travel, and the frustrating catch-22's of being an embed:

I would have been in trouble if I hadn't met these two guys. I may have been deposited in the reasonably safe Green Zone, but wandering around loose on my own in Baghdad, in the middle of the night, hauling 100 pounds of luggage, sleep-deprived, in extreme heat, and with nowhere to sleep does not put me in my happy place.

Mike Woodley showed up in an SUV to give Larry a ride. He said he could get me a bed at their compound before he realized I did not yet have a badge.

"They won't let you in," he said.

"Can't we just tell them I'm on my way to CPIC to pick up my badge?" I said.

"Doesn't matter," he said. "If you don't have it, the guards will not let you in."

"Is there a hotel I can check into?" I said. "What about the Al Rashid?"

"Al Rashid is in the Red Zone," he said. "And you can't get in there without a badge either."

Actually, the Al Rashid is in the Green Zone, right on the edge of it. But Mike was right about the hotel guards not letting me in without a badge. And I needed to get to the press office during business hours to get it.

Heh.

The most excellent Bill Roggio goes 501(c)(3).

Senator McCain on Iraq and the New York Times.

JD Johannes on the Anbar Awakening:

"Admission that they were wrong is tantamount to self-identity suicide."

Paging Thomas Ricks ...

One fellow who can apparently admit error on a different topic is Uncle J from Blackfive, here mourning his support for Rumsefeld long past when a legitimate counterinsurgency strategy was due. I agree, and stand similarly chastened, especially after absorbing books like Assassin's Gate and the testimony of various military commanders critical of the Pentagon's conduct of the war.

There's a tendency with any entrenched position - in this case the search for a successful Iraq - to react 180 degrees to a wave of criticism perceived as unfair. I went into detail on this back in September:

Read More »

Previously I highlighted a Strategy Page analysis on what is probably the most pressing challenge to a successful Iraqi state:

Corruption and lack of civic spirit continue to be the biggest problems in Iraq. This sort of thing does not make loud noises, so does not get into the mass media much. But what is done about corruption, will have more to do with Iraqs future, than the battle with terrorists.

This echoes my conclusions exactly.

Today's SP analysis achieves consensus again:

The war in Iraq is notable not because it is against guerillas or terrorists, but because of the large number of armed opposition groups that are, for all intents and purposes, criminal gangs. Such organizations have been around here for thousands of years, but Saddam made them more powerful by incorporating the loyal ones into his security organization. Maybe it was something he learned from the Russians (the KGB loved to work with gangsters), but it left post Saddam Iraq awash in criminal gangs. Sunni Arab gangs grew rich, Kurd and Shia gangs got constant heat. Many quickly discovered that there was money to be made by giving yourself a nationalistic or Islamic name and declaring loyalty to the cause of Sunni Arab supremacy. Al Qaeda and Saddam's old allies had cash and cachet that made the gangs more powerful. All they had to do was support the bombing program and attacks on cops and soldiers (local and foreign). Since many of these attacks were paid for, the gangs treated it like another bit of business, even if 90 percent of the attacks on U.S. troops failed. Their paymasters understood.

The whole thing is a must-read if you want to understand the fight in Iraq. And here are some of my previous thoughts on the same topic:

But as noted by Bryan Preston's write-up on the nature of "civil war," as well as my comments on Pundit Review and Mary Madigan's assessment of gangsterism in the larger war on terror, the popular perception of an Islamic civil war in Iraq is partially correct but incomplete, as there are major swaths of Iraqi society that aren't taking sides. In addition to outside players simply looking to sow chaos and destabilize Iraq to expedite an end to American involvement, much of the current violence is best described as splintered gangs vying to fill the power vacuum left after Saddam's deposal. Religion is often either besides the point, or used as a convenient demarcation.

This is an important point to remember when politicians advocating withdrawal characterize the Iraqis as "needing to work out their own problems." It's possible to arrive at this position intelligently, but if it's simply based on the idea that we have no business mediating a broad civil war over Islamic identity, then the view overgeneralizes and is based on incomplete information.

More detail on this power vacuum can be found in this radio interview with Pundit Review.

Latest Strategy Page article via Dave Price, who has further thoughts.

Erick Stakelbeck interviews former jihadist Dr. Tawfik Hamid. Teaser: what role does sexual suppression play in violent jihad, and how are Shia different from Sunni in this regard?

A must-read from Micheal Yon:

I've seen this kind of progression in Mosul, out in Anbar and other places, and when I ask our military leaders if they have sensed any shift, many have said, yes, they too sense that Iraqis view us differently. In the context of sectarian and tribal strife, we are the tribe that people can - more or less and with giant caveats - rely on.

Most Iraqis I talk with acknowledge that if it was ever about the oil, it's not now. Not mostly anyway. It clearly would have been cheaper just to buy the oil or invade somewhere easier that has more. Similarly, most Iraqis seem now to realize that we really don't want to stay here, and that many of us can't wait to get back home. They realize that we are not resolved to stay, but are impatient but to drive down to Kuwait and sail away. And when they consider the Americans who actually deal with Iraqis every day, the Iraqis can no longer deny that we really do want them to succeed. But we want them to succeed without us. We want to see their streets are clean and safe, their grass is green, and their birds are singing. We want to see that on television. Not in person. We don't want to be here. We tell them that every day. It finally has settled in that we are telling the truth.

I can back up his observation with my own experience. In January I interviewed a "Fallujan civil servant" who had to remain anonymous because of security and legal concerns. One detail I can now comfortably add is that this man was a former insurgent with the 1920 Revolution Brigades. But now ...

He then said that he'd like to tell me two things, but warned me that one may anger Americans, and he hoped they didn't get upset.

Yusef: "Through my [experience as an enemy], the way I look at Americans, I look at them and feel like they are occupiers, occupying my country when the invasion happened. But when other parties showed up - especially the radicals and the Iranian militias, both who are not Iraqis - now I prefer the Americans. I've met [various Americans working for Fallujah]. It is my feeling that [they are] working hard, and (before I knew) you (Americans) I had a different image. Now that I know the Americans, I have a different impression. Now I deal honestly with them and feel they are really working for the benefit of my side."

"I think the Americans are more for Iraq than the Iraqis themselves."

While this ideological shift doesn't apply to all Iraqis by any means, better late than never.

But perhaps too late.

This man's story needs to be read to be believed. A teaser:

On Jan. 25, 1945, Adm. Fluckey embarked on what Navy officials, seldom given to hyperbole, called "virtually a suicide mission -- a naval epic." In "an exceptional feat of brilliant deduction and bold tracking," in the words of his Medal of Honor citation, Adm. Fluckey found more than 30 Japanese vessels lurking in a concealed harbor protected by mines and rocky shoals.

Verified: