The Pro-War Crowd And Their Ever-Lower Standards

Glenn Greenwald makes the obvious and right point:

If the violence in Iraq continues to decrease — and even if one accepts the most dubious of premises in order to see it all in the best possible light (the decrease will endure, it’s because of the Magical Surge, the de facto ethnic cleansing can reverse itself, etc.) — that rather obviously doesn’t mean that the war has achieved anything positive, either in that country or for our own. It just means that we have begun to contain some of the monstrous harm which our invasion unleashed there.

As I have said before, returning violence in Iraq to its late 2005 levels is hardly a clear-cut triumph.  It’s as if to say, “Well, we’ve stopped the bleeding from this gaping wound, so that means that the other seventeen wounds will also soon heal.”  It is an accomplishment as far as it goes, but hardly one that changes anything fundamental about the overall futility or injustice of the war.