Instapundit linked up this (to me) compelling letter from a soldier in Iraq, discussing President Bush's latest speach:

Please, America, listen to the man.

The moment anyone puts a timetable on coalition forces leaving, we’ve lost the war. You can’t put a timetable on the good guys unless you can put one on the bad guys too. That’s ridiculous. You can’t put an exact timetable on training up the new Iraqi military and police forces. It would be irresponsible.

This is beginning to happen too often for me not to comment on it. The threads that the media used to unravel the Vietnam debacle were held in large part by individual soldiers, men like John Paul Vann and David Hackworth, who saw so much wasteful death they had to speak out. At first the very few reporters who did listen risked their careers to report what they heard, but eventually too many soldiers saw too many things for it to be ignored. The rest, as they say...

While not quite the opposite (not surprising, since Iraq isn't much like Vietnam after all), our current situation is eerilie like a negative image of the previous experince, blurred but reconizable, if only for its opposite shape. Today it's the editors, perhaps in response to a sort of institutional guilt for their culpability in the previous conflict, who seem to focus exclusively on the negative while the soldiers, who are best placed to see incompetence and mismanagement, seem to do everything they can to promote a positive view.

Were it not for the internet, the political result would be a foregone conclusion. The tens of thousands of lives (on all sides) currently lost would have been for naught, the tiger allowed to sleep again until the next lunatic upped the ante, perhaps next time wiping out a city instead of a few buildings. Even with the ability the internet brings to allow the soldiers themselves to be heard, victory is not certain.

But then again, what is?