At some point, things will start to break our way, if only because guerrillas, even the fruit-cakiest of them, cannot sustain themselves indefinitely against what Robert E. Lee, at Appomattox, called "overwhelming numbers and resources." Only an explicit decision by the United States to tuck tail and run could deliver Iraq back to the Baathists and similar riffraff. It is somehow comforting to know that even Howard Dean rejects this expedient.
There is a trick to this thing in the meantime -- a trick of the eyes. It involves looking around and noting the context in which present events go forward. Properly digested, the upcoming commemoration of Sept. 11 will amply confirm what we are about in Iraq.
And that thing is ... what? This, at bottom: ensuring that innocent Americans in office towers or airplanes never again find themselves set upon by homicidal maniacs howling for the heads of the "infidels." There are subsidiary purposes to the Iraq war. This is the main one -- sticking it to the America haters or, anyway, those who translate America hating into policy and action.
Nothing is neat and impeccably rational in this new kind of war, whose victims include not just the Qusays and Udays but also, presumably, some Iraqis who wouldn't have known the World Trade Center from the Tower of Babel. Who could like it this way? Who could suggest a milder way of, so to speak, clearing the streets of the murder gangs?
The murder gangs can be faceless, as with Al Qaeda, or they can pretend, like the former Baghdad regime, to the traits of organized society -- for which reason judging who hates us and then evaluating how to respond can be hideously hard.
As to the alternative, though, which is refusing to judge: "Hard" isn't the word for that. "Suicidal" is the word. The World Trade Center transcripts drive home this point with unforgettable force.