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Howard Fineman's MSNBC column, "Was It Worth It?", underscores how difficult it is for the United States to succeed in the war on terror given the public's media-driven demands for quick results and tied-up-in-bows conclusions. Fineman begins his gloomy, defeatist column with a letter written by an officer he will not name in a branch of the service he will not specify:
"Our eventual departure,” he worries, “will leave nothing but cosmetic structure here.” “Every mission,” he writes, “requires a conscious escape from the resignation that there is nothing here to win and every occasion to fail.”
Less than a month ago, Newsweek ran with an anonymous source's story on Koran abuse, and riots erupted and people died. Now we are treated to an anonymous officer tolling doom for the new Iraqi government.
I believe that Fineman has such a letter, and that it was written by an officer. So what? If you stop by Major K's blog, and especially the post "Getting the Hang of this Democracy Thing," you will get a completely different picture, but this one backed up by a name, a rank, and a picture.
There are lots of reasons an officer might send Fineman such a letter, reasons we cannot know because we don't have the specifics on the author. Fineman's decision to launch a column using that letter as opposed to Major K's post is a choice --one consistently made by MSM-- to lead with the bad news from Iraq and rarely, if ever, underscore not just the progress there, but also the alternative universe that would exist if, two years and two months ago, Saddam had not been removed.
The Washington Post has an account of the early effort to get the Iraq constitution drafting underway. "Was It Worth It?" might have reflected on the incalculable value of such a process in bringing the middle east out of its decades of corrupt dictatorial default setting, where the only previous alternative was a slide into theocracy. RegimeChangeIran is another site where skeptical western reporters might want to check when asking "Was It Worth It?" Or perhaps a close inspection of the latest story on the terror network, which has Sacramento FBI chief Keith Slotter saying "[w]e believe from our investigation that various individuals connected to Al Qaeda have been operating in the Lodi area in various capacities, including individuals who have received terrorist training abroad." The GWOT cannot be sliced and diced into convenient easy to win battles and tough slogs that require years of occupation.
It is all one war. What is amazing and dispiriting is that a journalist as admired as Howard Fineman can be asking, less than four years after 9/11, "Was It Worth It?", as though there was any real alternative.
