Almost daily Corner bashing

Just when I thought I'd found some substantial common ground with the National Review team (see below post), I go and read something like this:

Our enemies know that the war that counts is the one for the American mind. If we believe that the war is lost, they win. They have an incentive to keep fighting and to kill as many people as they can. In a gun battle with American troops, the insurgents lose. So they concentrated on killing as many Iraqis as they can in the hope and expectation that the news will demoralize the American public.

Here again is an example of this really childish tendency on the part of war pundits to say, "Hey! No fair!" to tactics used by people who, among other things, don't want us there. The right would like to obscure the fact, though, that these people are killing each other for a lot of reasons, the least of which is that they want us out. There are actual violent sectarian rivalries. There are also domestic and foreign fighters there who are killing each other and killing Americans because they want us to leave. Those facts remain true with or without public criticism of the war, and they make the operation--creating a political settlement--futile no matter what any war opponent says. They remain true whether or not anybody in the media or in American government announces that the war is lost. Does anybody really believe that if only Harry Reid would keep his mouth shut the insurgents would revert to battlefield-style warfare a la the Redcoats in 1776?

I don't think that's what they believe. I think what's more likely is that, for whatever reason, a segment of conservatives just want this fight to go on ad infinitum. This is why they support the surge. They know the war is a fiasco so they need both people to blame (Reid, Pelosi, liberals) for the failures thus far and a peg from which to accuse people who want the war to end of sabotaging the new-but-perfectly-arbitrary escalation strategy. The argument then becomes that it's nearly treasonous to oppose any plan that "might work" as if "might work" were equivalent to "likely to work." It's the sort of logic that makes one wonder whether these are the sort of people who would support anything--even perhaps the nuclear destruction of Baghdad--as long as they could say that war opponents were trying to forestall a strategy that "might work."

That's why they say vile things like this:

There’s no way to know for sure, but I believe that the bomb attacks in Iraq that caused such carnage in recent days are the expected consequences of the Democrats’ efforts to undercut the president’s new team and the changed strategy represented by the so-called “surge.” We know what the Bush surge is. I think a good name for the increasing body count in Iraq is the “Reid surge.”