"No Victory"

It’s refreshing to see that intelligent people dealing with facts on the ground in Iraq—like David Petraeus—dismiss “victory” talk as too simplistic. It’s a shame that the Republican party, traditionally the party of cold-blooded realpolitik, has hitched its wagon to the neoconservative project, because it allows the other side to plausibly claim that mere sanity in foreign policy is somehow “progressive“.