Today you wrote:

"It's hard to be optimistic at all about Iraq..."

Optimism is for people who believe in progress — in other words, not conservatives. The world sucks, permanently, but let us do our best to bend its suckiness to our advantage, as that is the most we can hope for. I think we have done that in Iraq, with greater and lesser success, but done it we have.

Now, let us count the ways we prefer post-invasion Iraq to pre-invasion Iraq.

1) Saddam, not so much a dictator anymore.

2) Uday and Qusay dead — sad to say and not very Christian of me, but sometimes the world is better when really bad guys get iced.

3) Speaking of bad guys, I like that they seem to be attracted to Iraq as a place to come and visit violence on we Americans. We have fine American fighting men and women in Iraq who can shoot them in the face. This is, on balance, preferable to them coming to Hoboken to blow up shopping malls and then lawyering up.

Please don't contribute to the negativism. Courage. Life sucks, but we're Americans, and that's still as good as it gets.

Indeed. As the troops in the Sandbox observe: "Sometimes, you just have to embrace the suck."

Which inspires me to post this picture... again...

Followed with the Blogfather's observations -

Whatever the merits of the charge that Iraq is a "distraction" from the war on terror, the reality is that arguments about Bush are a larger distraction from the war on terror. For much of the past five years, Democrats not in the Joe Lieberman wing of the party — which is to say the Democratic Party, minus one — have repeatedly pointed to Osama bin Laden's ability to elude capture (as opposed to, say, his inability to once again murder thousands on American soil) as proof that Bush's anti-terror efforts have been a failure. It would surely be nice to see bin Laden's head on a pike, but this is childishly partisan.

When U.S. forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, bin Laden's "prince" in Iraq, Democrats presented Zarqawi's demise as good but trivial news. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla. — who might (shudder) take over the House Intelligence Committee should the GOP lose the Congress — explained, "It won't stop the insurgency. I have found if you liken it to the drug lords, for example, as soon as you imprison one, kill one, another takes his place."

Why shouldn't this same logic apply to bin Laden and the global Islamic insurgency? Does anyone believe that this polyglot army of jihadist murderers will disband and become TV repairmen the moment bin Laden is dead? This is as naive as believing that U.S. withdrawal from Iraq wouldn't be scored as another jihadist victory. Not only have Hezbollah, Hamas and the rest of the League of Extraordinary Murderers never taken marching orders from bin Laden, but like all jihadist groups they always view such withdrawals as an invitation to even more brazen terrorism.

Indeed. I think I'll go polish a Polish rifle.