Anti-War Crowd Isn't Looking for Progress

Perception is reality. We've all heard that a million times.

I remember a college psychology professor putting that claim to a real-world test. He described an experiment in which officials' close calls from a football game were shown to fans of both teams.

Predictably, each group of fans felt the proper call was the one benefiting their team. This was no sports bar poll; it was legitimate research, and participants were asked for their most thoughtful honesty as to what they saw.

One would think such an earnest request for objectivity would yield roughly the same impressions from both groups.

That didn't happen. The experiment confirmed what we all colloquially know - that what we believe we see is driven heavily by what we want to see.

Beyond the sports world, this explains how people can believe that a candidate with no chance of success is a sure thing; it explains how believers in a doomed business insist that a change of fate is just around the corner; and it explains a big chunk of the war debate now that the surge may be starting to work.

Last year was horrible for those of us who support the war in Iraq. We watched as troops we admire dodged bullets and IEDs in an effort that brought water and health care to much of barren Iraq but did not bring the peace and stability that would have spelled real progress.

I spent much of the year describing my unshaken faith, but dealing with how the events on the ground played out did not exactly give me cause for further optimism. It was my job to recognize that this war that I believe in with my whole heart might just fail.

I was scolded for this. "Don't lose faith," callers and e-mailers told me, missing the point entirely. My faith was not in question. But if my faith led me to see progress where there was none, I no longer deserved a place at the table of rational debate.

Today, I see progress. Not because I want progress, but because there is progress. Just as I was fair game last year for anyone who wanted to say, "See? Even some war supporters admit the war is on the ropes," I can now point to war critics who cite evidence that things are turning around.

I refer most prominently to Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the liberally inclined Brookings Institution, who returned from Iraq to pen a New York Times op-ed piece that has made them heroes to war supporters and devils to the rabid anti-war left.

Their provocative conclusion: The war has truly turned some important corners. Their essay, "A War We Just Might Win," should be Googled by every American, not because it makes a point that pleases me, but because it makes a point that might be true.

The evidence cited by Mr. O'Hanlon and Mr. Pollack (and corroborated by other recent visitors to Iraq, not all from the pro-war amen chorus) should be welcomed by every American.

It is not, which proves to me that some in our country, from Main Street to Capitol Hill, actively want us to lose. In the most venomous corridors of anti-war sentiment, success in Iraq accrues to the benefit of a George W. Bush legacy that simply must be left in tatters as a moral imperative. This zeal outweighs even the most basic human decency to wish a good result for one's country at war.

The war situation is improving. Much more needs to improve, but there is a basis for objective optimism. I can't make Bush-haters and war-haters like it, but I do expect them to admit it.