In Michael Fumento’s latest post he takes on boosterism.

A lot of people like AEI Scholar Robert Kagan’s reports on Iraq because he says what they want to hear. He’s a booster. Thus, for example, he writes in his latest column in the Sunday Washington Post that “NBC’s Brian Williams recently reported a dramatic change in Ramadi since his previous visit. The city was safer; the airport more secure.” Actually, I’ve seen that Ramadi is safer than it had been. Alas, it has no airport. It hasn’t since the war began. It has landing zones for helicopters but not even a strip of runway on which C-130s can land. Brian Williams, having been to Ramadi would know that and indeed a search of his writings turn up no mention of any Ramadi airport.

Okay, so Kagan committed a faux pas. But it doesn’t enhance one’s credibility to say a place that doesn’t exist is “more secure.” Nor does it help his overall theme as expressed in the title of his column “The ‘Surge’ Is Succeeding.” It’s way to early to make any such pronouncements. What we’ve seen so far is that as American forces increased, Sadr apparently just slipped across the border to a safe haven in Iran and has clearly told his men to lay low for the duration of the “surge.” When the tide ebbs, he plans to reclaim the beach. It is a good plan, which isn’t to say it will work. Our best hope is that his men can’t take it anymore and defy Sadr, giving us the chance to kill and capture them. But that clearly hasn’t happened yet and it may never.

Defeatism certainly doesn’t help anything, but boosterism is just a temporary feel-good shot in the arm. It did not help that in May of 2005 Vice-President Cheney claimed the insurgency is “in it’s last throes.” It did not help that Karl Zinsmeister, than also with AEI (and somebody who actually has been to Iraq), published an article in his own magazine a month later declaring “The War is Over, and We Won.” Only realistic assessments of the war will lead to realistic actions, and only realistic actions can lead to salvaging something resembling victory out of this war.

At the AEI I closely follow only Michael Ledeen (and to some  lesser extent Michael Rubin), so I cannot claim to know anything about Robert Kagan.  But I would still like to offer up a few comments on Michael’s main thesis.  Michael Fumento is always clear-headed and sensible, and I admire not only his prose, but his powers of analysis.  I do not consider myself to be a ‘rah rah’ blogger.  There are enough of those, and in my opinion they hurt the war effort almost as much as the biased and highly negative reports from the MSM.

From the very beginning of my short career in blogging, I have called out what I believe to be the more manifest errors of Operation Iraqi Freedom, including inadequate force size, overly-restrictive rules of engagement, open borders with Jordan, Syria and Iran, failing to see the larger implications of the regional war that is occurring, failure of the State Department and the entire administration to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for funding some of the terrorist activities inside Iraq, and imposition of a foreign political system into the Iraqi way of life, the very system itself (parliamentary) creating the inability to hold its largest voting bloc accountable.

There is incredible bravery in Iraq, and just as incredible cowardice at home.  There are victories on the battlefield and terrible losses in hospitals in Iraq and back in the states, with awful costs to our young men such as traumatic brain injury.  There have been huge successes in OIF, with counterinsurgency failures that have been just as stunning in OIF2 and OIF3 as the victories were in OIF1.  I operate under the philosophy that the truth is always the best thing to purvey to the readers.  So does Michael Fumento, who writes on a grander scale than I.