One of the tiresome things about reading other blogs these days is the incessant urge to comment on how our military strategy is going in Iraq. No one who is sitting at home in America getting their news from CNN or online newspapers can possibly have any real idea what our military strategy even is in the first place, let alone how well it is working. Most of what we see reported now will turn out to have been false (whether because of deliberate disinformation or errors by reporters) or inaccurate or woefully incomplete. We won't know the real story until someone with inside information writes a book about it a year from now, and even then there will be a lot of stuff we'll never know. And, to be quite blunt, even if American news sources provided complete, accurate, up-to-the-minute information about 1) what is actually happening in Iraq, and 2) what our military plan is, I would still see no particular reason to care what a public policy professor or an undergraduate philosophy major or a graduate student in colonial history or a nameless partisan hack or a lawyer have to say.

There now. Got that out of my system.