This is a quagmire, General McClellan!

Here’s my slightly modified version of the opening of E. J. Dionne’s “Behind the Failure” in today’s Washington Post:

Can we now please admit that the Lincoln administration's policies in the South are a terrible failure?

The federal retreat at the Battle of Bull Run in Manassas this week also blew up the pretensions of an arrogant strategy that assumed the United States could do nation-rebuilding on the cheap. It was an approach that assumed we needed little support from traditional allies, only a limited number of troops and relatively modest expenditures to rebuild a shattered country.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the administration's indifference to the truth or falsity of the various claims it made before the war is the fact that it seemed to believe its own propaganda. President Lincoln and Vice President Hamlin really thought that if they wished it, it would come -- "it" in this case being not only a quick victory in the war but also a rapid rallying of the South to the new American standard afterward.

Dionne goes well beyond the limits of reasoned discourse and over the cliff into shrill partisan rancor. His thesis is that the Bush administration horribly miscalculated how Americans would be received in Iraq after the invasion, as evidenced by the terrorist truck bombing this past week. To Dionne, this single, desperate act spells failure in Iraq. Pay no mind to the Marine who sent this report to the Wall Street Journal:

The "Arab Street" I've meet in Iraq loves--that's not too strong of a word--America and is deeply grateful for our presence. Far from resenting the American military, most Iraqis seem to fear that we will leave too soon and that in our absence the Baath Party tyranny will resume. This sentiment is readily apparent whenever we venture into the city. We don't make it far outside of our camp before throngs of happy, smiling children greet us.

But at least Dionne has an answer to the “failure”: more troops. How additional soldiers would have prevented the suicide bombing at U.N. headquarters or any of the other last gasp attacks by the Islamofascists is beyond my ken. Maybe E.J. can explain how a Humvee becomes impervious to an RPG attack when it has four Americans riding along instead of two.

There is no “failure” in Iraq – just the increasingly desperate actions of a small few who wish to derail American progress at any cost. E.J. Dionne shouldn’t, however tangentially, define their terrorism as a “success.” The Bush administration would do well to ignore the writings of this modern-day Horace Greeley.