18 May Washington Times commentary - Petraeus and PC-policy-making by Dinah West.

"This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we — not our enemies — occupy the moral high ground."

—Gen. David Petraeus, May 10

Oh, they must, must they?

With his single sentence, Gen. David Petraeus reveals what's wrong with our Iraq policy. Success depends not on our own actions, but on a politically correct expectation of how Iraqis will react to those actions. It seems that victory depends on something over which we have no control — the point of view and behavior of people in Iraq.

Consider the "surge." Even if our troops achieve the goal of "securing the population" by securing Baghdad, success still rides on subsequent Iraqi behavior: whether murderously competing Iraqi sects decide to come together and sing "Kumbayah" — what you might call a big "whether."

Somehow, I'm practically alone among conservatives in believing this to be a dangerously ill-conceived policy (Surrender-crats aren't worth discussing here), and I think I know why. The Iraq policy itself is an outgrowth of another dangerously ill-conceived policy of our leaders to avoid any rational assessment of the Islamic culture that informs the point of view and behavior of people across the Fertile Crescent in the first place...