'Eventually, America should go ... Not right now, but in time'
The fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war is approaching -- and Charlie Sennott provides another good MSM overview of what's happening in Iraq. Militarily, the surge is working. Politically, it's not. The time is approaching, ready or not, for the troops to come home, albeit 'not right now, but in time.' ... FYI: Hub Blog is deliberately trying to provoke the hyper-pro-war blowhards by going out of my way to praise the MSM's coverage of the war. It's been far more accurate than the 'happy-talk' types who are still insisting that the good news in Iraq is being repressed, while studiously ignoring what Sennott (and others, including Gen. Petraeus) are saying about the lack of substantive political changes there. Even average Iraqi peasants know that the country will blow up if the Americans pull out too fast. That's some 'victory.' ...

Update -- John Burns has a terrific piece that looks back on the last five years. He criticizes the pre-war press for a mistake beyond the botched WMD coverage:

If we accurately depicted the horrors of Saddam’s Iraq in the run-up to the war, with its charnel houses and mass graves, we have to acknowledge that we were less effective, then, in probing beneath the carapace of terror to uncover other facets of Iraq’s culture and history that would have a determining impact on the American project to build a Western-style democracy, or at least the basics of a civil society.

It was not easy, with a reporter’s every move scrutinized by Saddam Hussein’s lugubrious minders, to undertake that kind of in-depth reporting. But from the exhaustive reporting in the years since, Americans now know how deeply traumatized Iraqis were by the brutality of Saddam, and how deep was the poison of fear and distrust. ...

They know, too, through coverage in this newspaper and others, of the deep fissures, of ethnicity, sect and tribe, that were camouflaged by the quarter-century of Mr. Hussein’s totalitarian rule. As much as America’s policy failures, it has been these factors that have contributed to the Iraqi quagmire. Properly weighed, in time, they might have given cause for second thoughts about the wisdom of the invasion.

  ¶ 9:40 AM