If you want to worry about the pernicious effect of politics in the war zone, a much better place to look would be the administration's willingness to send utterly incompetent ideological hacks to do jobs in Iraq that would have been much better served by real professionals. As for the issues raised in the article, it's pretty clear that Journo has not the first clue about what kind of war this is, or what it could have meant for us to win it. That he could write a sentence like this just shows that he's, basically, a space cadet:

"As noted in news articles since the start of the war, American forces are ordered not to bomb key targets, such as power plants, and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest they offend Muslim sensibilities."

That's bad enough. But he goes on to hallucinate that the motivation for such policies is a misplaced form of "compassion", which reveals that he simply doesn't give enough of a damn about the truth here to have even slightly googled on the topic that he felt somehow empowered to write a column on.

This brand of detached-from-reality thinking is exactly the sort of thing that has doomed us to failure in Iraq from the start.

And the soldiers are right. In Iraq, Washington's rules have systematically prevented our brave and capable troops from using all necessary force to win, to crush the insurgency--and even to protect themselves. As noted in news articles since the start of the war, American forces are ordered not to bomb key targets, such as power plants, and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest they offend Muslim sensibilities.

Ugh. More nonsense from yet another think tank military expert. Of course our soldiers are chafing under their rules of engagement in Iraq --- they are fighting a counterinsurgency against an enemy not in uniform in largely urban environments, where as Eric notes, it would be foolishly counter-productive to unleash our full military might. The problems with applying deadly force our soldiers are facing in Baghdad and the large towns are the same ones that the NYPD and LAPD face every day. I'm sure cops also chafe at their restrictions, but they also fear the power of the press and public perception.

The writer from the Ayn Rand Institute cconveniently forgets something that the Pentagon hasn't: that countering guerilla operations is only one part of a successful counterinsurgency --- that the other two equally important parts are political action and civic action (civic action refers to building roads and bridges, etc).

With regards to civic action, the AP recently noted that Iraq's power grid is on the brink of total collapse. (Probably a good reason to avoid taking Elan Journo's suggestion to bomb power plants).

Even O'Hanlon and Pollack admitted in their NY Times op-ed that although there appears to be some movement towards clearing out AQinIraq from Anbar province, and violence among the various factions has been somewhat tamped down in the large towns, there has been no progress at all with regards to political action, that the Maliki gov't has made zero progress towards national reconciliation. There will be no agreement until the Shia are forced to share, and we have not been able to force that to happen.

No, the real disgrace was to knowingly put our nation and its military in the untenable position of being occupiers in "a bitterly hostile land," to quote the senior Bush.