Victor Does Afghanistan

This post by Clark Stooksbury about a recent Victor Davis Hanson article on Afghanistan caused me to look at this page on Icasualtues for the first time in weeks.

It is interesting to note that the number of coalition fatalities is already higher than last year's, although an increasing proportion of fatalities are from countries other than the U.S.

I remember a few years ago we were told by neocons that Afghanistan was a success story that either showed how successful he neocon mission to the Middle East could really be, or that it was proof that Iraq would have worked had we followed the neocon model there as we had in Afghanistan (presumably meaning had we put Chalabi in charge as we had with Karzai).

But it seems that the winds have shifted, and a new idea is being put across, namely, that if you supported the war in Afghanistan, now that it may turn out like Iraq, you obviously ought to support Iraq as well, or perhaps more precisely, that the deaths in Afghanistan legitimize the deaths in Iraq, as if the higher casualty rates were the only thing making the Iraq invasion less justifiable than the one in Afghanistan.

We will see, but I doubt that anyone who isn't already committed to the war in Iraq will buy that.

That is all.