Republican base smells... victory... or is it burning humvees?; no, it's definitely victory, probably, kind of, someday maybe

From the Washington Post:

With public opinion tilting firmly toward ending U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq, Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest (R-Md.) might have expected praise for his votes that would start to bring the troops home. Instead, at town hall meetings on the Eastern Shore, the former Marine and Vietnam combat veteran has been called a coward and a traitor.[emphasis added] ...the GOP's core voters...see the war in Iraq in fundamentally different terms than Democrats and political independents do, said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Voters from those groups tend to see unremitting gloom, but Republican base voters continue to see a conflict that is going reasonably well, with a decent chance of military success. House Republican Conference Chairman Adam H. Putnam (R-Fla.) said yesterday on CNN's "Late Edition." "Everybody knows war is ugly. But the fact of the matter is that defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq and bringing stability to that country is important to the security of this country."

Note to militant jingos: Grow up. No matter how much you want to be able to tell stories of military glory, it's not going to happen here because this isn't a comic book; it's a complicated political situation that doesn't lend itself to straightforward military victory. You could kill people and destroy things to your heart's content and we would be no closer to a workable political resolution or a stable Iraqi state. While there is not much positive that can be achieved with further use of military force in Iraq, there is a whole lot of negative stuff we can bring about if we stay. Continuing the occupation will make it harder to achieve stability in Iraq and harder to defeat al Qaeda. If those are the indeed the goals (rather than, um, you know, avoiding having to admit responsibility for a monumental clusterfuck), then ending the occupation is the best thing we could do now. It wouldn't be pretty, because we're fresh out of happy endings at this point, so we need to act like adults, accept the consequences of our actions, and minimize the further damage that we do.