The Five-Day War

According to Mickey Kaus, five days of no major bombings in Baghdad (still the random scattered 20-30 bodies in the street and plenty of violence in the rest of the country) is dead-solid proof that the surge is an unqualified success. Pay no attention to day six.

Militants struck back Sunday in their first major blow against a U.S.-led security clampdown in Baghdad with car bombings that killed at least 63 people, left scores injured and sent a grim message to officials boasting that extremist factions were on the run.

The attacks in mostly Shiite areas -- twin explosions in an open-air market that claimed 62 lives and a third blast that killed one -- were a sobering reminder of the challenges confronting any effort to rattle the well-armed and well-hidden insurgents.

Every discussion I've had with conservative pro-war people is that we were in Germany for 50 years and you can't talk about Iraq today because it's just a comma in history and you can't look at every little event and blow it up to absolute and total significance. Granted, so stop doing it when it suits your side. The preponderance of four years of evidence states that this country will not be pacified and talked out of a violent civil war. Five days isn't making any difference to anyone.

What LGM said:

Let's be as clear as possible; it isn't pessimism or anti-administration rancor to doubt that an explicitly temporary increase of a fraction of the number of troops necessary to pacify a country the size of Iraq will have a meaningful impact on the insurgency; it's realism.