July 02, 2007

Good George Packer Post on Iraq

George Packer (who wrote a great book on Iraq last year) also has a blog over at the New Yorker. He muses about Phil Carter (who runs Intel-Dump, a great military blog), who has served in Iraq and now feels that the continued war is almost hopeless. It's a short post, but the money quote has to be:

It's almost impossible for soldiers to accept this [that the war might be lost - ed.] psychologically while they're still in the fight, especially if the fight has been as costly as the Iraq war. While Phil Carter was in Baquba, he thought that he needed more time, more money, more equipment. He had to come home to realize that there were much larger forces preventing him from achieving his mission. Dave Kilcullen returns from Iraq this week; when I see him in a few days, I'll be embarrassed to ask these questions of someone who's just had his whole heart in the war. It's part of the tragedy and the waste: the more good people struggle and suffer, the harder it is to write it all off.

In other words, the people over there fighting have a great deal invested in winning (on a personal level), and may not be the best to judge our overall effectiveness or chance of success. This isn't to say that we discount them (they are over there, after all, and perhaps have the best information), but that we shouldn't accept their arguments as "truth" either.

In any event, the Packer post is good.

Posted by baltar at July 2, 2007 12:59 PM | TrackBack | Posted to International Affairs | Iraq | Military Affairs


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