Grammar Lesson

In the wake of the latest "I walked around a market in Iraq and didn't get blown up so we're winning" narrative by some oh-so-serious foreign policy experts, and in anticipation that General Petraeus's September report will just be more of the same old same old, Speaker Nancy Pelosi provides a much-needed grammar lesson: "The plural of anecdote is not data."

Indeed, in an enterprise as large and complex as occupying a country, it's no doubt possible to find all sorts of "successes". But at a certain point, our revived fascination with lists of military victories begins to sound a lot like that talk back in 2004 about how great things were about to become because so many new schools were being built. A nice thing, to be sure, this school-building, but it didn't improve the political situation — the root of the problem(s) — one bit. And neither is the "surge". In fact, these "successes" in Anbar (that don't, in fact, have much to do with increased troop levels in the first place) are getting ready to literally blow up in our faces.