Broder on Criteria of Success in Iraq

This is worth a read, and relevant to earlier posts about measuring success in Iraq. It's obvious that we can't trust the administration's word on this; but neither can we trust the claims of the frothing-at-the-mouth anti-war crowd. What we need is some kind of metric (Azael rehearsed some common and reasonable suggestions here earlier).

I guess my first worry here is that this will end up like the body count debacle of Vietnam. But we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

Incidentally, I think that it might be reasonable to froth at the mouth against this war. I'm not saying it's an unreasonable reaction, I'm saying that we usually can't trust the assessments of those with frothy mouths. That raises a problem though: if a real outrage is outrageous enough to make a reasonable person (to stick with my increasingly annoying metaphor) froth at the mouth...well, you see the problem. If an administration does something outrageous enough to make the rational people who oppose it lose their cool, then they win a rhetorical victory by effectively neutralizing rational critics.

I'm not saying that's what this administration has done...but sometimes I wonder.