Almost daily Corner bashing

Deconstructing the latest from Mario Loyola, world's finest blogger, is my Corner-bashing project for the day. Here we go!

What I’m hearing from some folks in the military is that the Iraq war has proven tiring for both sides—but it is much more taxing on the enemy than people realize over here. Sooner or later, one side is bound to start getting tired more quickly and more thoroughly than the other. So it is perfectly understandable for folks in the military to say (as I often hear them do) that America can only lose if it loses patience.

I'll take him at his word that "some folks in the military" say this. I'll also assume that this means that "other folks in the military" don't hold this view and that many of them believe basically the opposite. Moving on:

Unfortunately, America is growing tired of the apparently endless bad news—and that translates into impatience. This impatience is good news in the short-term for the Democrats, because it unifies their base in opposition to the Bush administration. But it engenders a serious communications problem, because Democratic leaders then find themselves saying a lot of things that are music to the ears of our enemies. It was with great satisfaction that the Iranian press noted Harry Reid’s comments that the war is "lost" so long as we keep following the current strategy—i.e., so long as we keep trying to win. And that is a very embarrassing problem for Harry Reid, no matter how much you may agree with him.

I actually think that Loyola's right about the dynamic here, but the existence of that dynamic is a pyre through the heart of his and his allies' claims to intellectual honesty. Namely, Reid's problem is that many Americans have come to believe that the only foreign policy steps the United States should take are ones that would be ignored by (or recapitulated with anger by) the Iranian press. I wonder where they got that ridiculous notion in the first place?

Most Democrats take a principled stand that the situation is hopeless and that the best thing for America is to get out of Iraq. But with so many Americans still in the fight, and still committed to it, the Democratic position engenders a very tricky communications problem—it looks and smells like surrender. And the problem is that we haven’t lost. The object of war is to break the enemy’s will to continue fighting. And the enemy has not yet broken our will to continue fighting. And people are justified in thinking that the enemy may crack first.

This is standard Yglesias-patented Green Lantern thinking. I don't imagine any conservative has ever attempted to argue against the folly of Green Lantern geopolitics, because that would be a fool's errand. But here's an interesting question: What if the advocates of withdrawal are right--that, will or no will, the war can't be won. What if, for instance, John McCain wins the presidency? What will Mario Loyola say when, five or ten years from now, our will does break? When the number of American deaths has surpassed 10,000 and the number of Iraqi's killed is over one-million, and when it's clear that things could have ended so much sooner? Will the intellectual honesty that people like Mario Loyola claim to  possess come out of hibernation and will they acknowledge that the blame for death toll rests on their side? Or will they, more predictably, blame the entire catastrophe on withdrawal advocates, who stomped out America's will to fight when a little bit more will was all we needed to win.