Military expert Tom Donnelly writes that the debate in Washington is completely cut off from what is happening in Iraq:
“IT IS AN ESPECIALLY cruel but increasingly common irony of the war in Iraq that Washington and Baghdad are in separate universes: what happens over there is not much connected to what’s happening back here. But Sunday’s New York Times “Week in Review” section sets a new standard for cognitive dissonance.
“Spread across the top two-thirds of the front page is John Burns’ latest dispatch from Iraq. The subject is the U.S. campaign to win back the city of Ramadi and al Anbar province from al Qeada and other Sunni extremists. A year after a Marine intelligence report described the region as ‘lost,’ Burns explains ‘an astonishing success’ in what was ‘Iraq’s most dangerous city.’ Now, cooperation between local tribal leaders and the U.S. military ‘has all but ended the fighting in Ramadi and recast the city as a symbol of hope that the tide of war may yet be reversed to favor the Americans and their Iraqi allies.’ Victory, in Burns’ assessment, is a long way off, but is possible.”
But the debate in Washington is different. Senators come to Washington and are vastly influenced by the Washington Post and New York Times-which the majority of their constituents never see, couldn’t care less about. Nevertheless, they worry about what these papers, which lionize each new GOP defection, will think.
Should we move the capitol to a more rational state (geographic and of being)?