The problem with war

I was just thinking about World War II this morning and one of my favorite history books, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Then I read this post from Matthew Yglesias and was reminded of one ironic fact about WWII. England and France finally stood up to Nazi Germany and declared war on her when Hitler invaded Poland. The whole original point of the war, one could argue, was to liberate Poland.

But six years later, with Europe a smoking ruin and millions dead, the Allies declared victory. And Poland remained occupied, now by the Soviet Union.

A funny thing, war...

SPEAKING OF... some stories on Iraq:

Senator Joe Biden called the surge in Iraq a failure since no political reconciliation has taken place there (or here, for that matter!).

A reminder from Obama:

On Friday, he said: ""We still don't have a good answer to the question posed by Sen. (John) Warner the last time Gen. Petraeus appeared: How has this effort in Iraq made us safer and how do we expect it will make us safer in the long run?"

And a year after releasing their original report, the Iraq Study Group has this to say:

A new assessment of U.S. policy in Iraq by the same experts who advised the original Iraq Study Group concludes that political progress is "so slow, halting and superficial" and political fragmentation "so pronounced" that the United States is no closer to being able to leave Iraq than it was a year ago.

The experts were reassembled by the U.S. Institute of Peace, which convened the congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group, a high-level panel that assessed U.S. policy in Iraq and offered recommendations in 2006. The new report predicts that lasting political development could take five to 10 years of "full, unconditional commitment" to Iraq, but also cautions that future progress may not be worth the "massive" human and financial costs to the United States.