National Review no hotbed of cold feet
National Review’s editors calls for patience on Iraq:
Just as it was a year ago, the despair about our prospects in Iraq is exaggerated. But now it is beginning to issue in congressional calls for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. The insurgents should be delighted. Washington has always been a key center of gravity for the insurgency. Wearing down America’s political will and forcing a premature pull-out is a prerequisite for their success. If we were ever so foolish as to announce such a timetable, Iraqis would see the writing on the wall and the political situation would decisively tilt against us there, making our continued military presence truly unsupportable. Calls for a timetable are deeply irresponsible and President Bush must  and we have every expectation he will  resist them.
They also the President’s men to stop making unsupportably optimistic statements:
Vice President Cheney famously said the other day that the insurgency is in its “last throes,†an implausible reading of the situation reminiscent of Secretary Rumsfeld’s initial insistence two years ago that there wasn’t a guerilla insurgency in Iraq. There is a case for optimism in Iraq, but if it is made in a way that seems untethered from reality  and from the fact that after ebbing in the aftermath of the January elections, the insurgency is flowing again  it will be dismissed out of hand.
The difficulty of crafting a realistic and helpful strategy in Iraq can hardly be overstated. It is widely agreed that we must convince the majority of the Sunnis to join the political process as currently framed and accepting their status as a non-dominant minority. Unless that happens, the insurgency is likely to on forever or until it is quashed by the non-Sunni majority, a development that could well set off more violence between Iraq and non-Iraqi Sunnis.
At any rate, the one thing we should have learned by now is that it’s better to wait at least a couple of months before reacting to whatever is going on in Iraq. Remember, it was only a little more than a year ago that everything seemed as if it was about to fall apart.
