No Miracle in Baghdad

And on the other side of the argument from my previous post today, a feeling of resignation and need for withdrawal from troops in Baghdad. An excerpt:

With few reliable surveys of soldiers’ attitudes, it is impossible to simply extrapolate from the small number of soldiers in Delta Company. But in interviews with more than a dozen soldiers over a one-week period with this 83-man unit, most said they were disillusioned by repeated deployments, by what they saw as the abysmal performance of Iraqi security forces and by a conflict that they considered a civil war, one they had no ability to stop.


As often, it's hard to get a definitive sense of what's going on, but taken in aggregate, the news leaves no reason to be optimistic.