Jeff over at The Bernoulli Effect reminds us all that a violent insurgency does not mean failure – near term or long term.

It’s been pointed out that the Baader-Meinhof gang kept all of West Germany on edge for a decade or so, with probably less than a hundred members. The Red Brigades, the IRA–these groups exploded bombs and killed innocent people for years (and the IRA is by far the largest with maybe a thousand members), yet no reasonable person can argue that the countries they operated in were failures, or in chaos, or were quagmires.

Yet the Democrats, not to mention those farther to the left, check the latest reports of car bombings and ambushes as trumpeted by the New York Times and declare that that the Iraq war is a failure, a “Vietnam”. So why is there so little attention being paid to the massive counterbalancing factors: The functioning representative Iraqi government? The rebuilding of the infrastructure? The expansion of freedom and human rights?

The answer is, unfortunately, quite simple. To suggest Iraq will be a success, even to a minor degree, means admitting they were wrong and Bush and his team were right. And there is nothing more important to the liberal die hards than their need to be right. Sad really.