WSJ editorial suggests humility over elections

The WSJ editorial page published a measured editorial by a professor from the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) which suggests that we use the good news from Iraq as an opportunity to assess both the positives and negatives of US record in Iraq.   

".. If the war has had its great successes, it has also had more than its share of bungles, evident in the chaos and suffering in Iraq, heavy loss of American life, and a battered reputation for the United States abroad."

"...The U.S. government that had not provided the structure needed to administer postwar Iraq would not admit his deficiencies and replace him. Instead, he, like George Tenet and Gen. Tommy Franks -- equally able and patriotic men, who also failed in key aspects of the Iraq war -- received the Presidential Medal of Freedom."

".....Here came the second class of failures. For a very long time, the U.S. government would not even use the word insurgency. Until recently it insisted that we faced only 5,000 "former regime loyalists, jihadis, and released criminals."……In guerrilla war nothing matters more than raising and training indigenous forces; we passed that job off to Vinnell Corporation, and only belatedly realized that we needed our best general, supported by American soldiers and Marines, to do the job."