The age of uncertainty: all we know is that we know something.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Rant

SO, HOW'S IT going in Iraq? No, really. As we learn to measure the U.S. engagement there in years and (let's face reality) decades, only this much seems absolutely beyond question: On a very basic level, it's virtually impossible to know whether the occupation is going well or horribly wrong. This is above and beyond the question of whether we should be there in the first place.

Walter Lippman once famously suggested that it was hard enough figuring out what was really going on in the neighborhoods of Manhattan, let alone the far-flung nations of the world. Most of us, even the CNN and Fox News obsessives, are relying on second-, third-, and fourth-hand reports by people whose best efforts to understand, say, the Sunni Triangle, are about as reliable as the restaurant prices in a 20-year-old copy of Let's Go: Iraq.

For every shot of mutilated American corpses being dragged through the streets of Fallujah, there are accounts of relatively orderly elections being held in other parts of the country--elections, moreover, in which Islamist candidates have been doing poorly. For every call to avoid another Vietnam, there are reminders that overwhelming majorities in Iraq feel better about their future then they did before the Saddam statues were toppled (yes, yes, by U.S. soldiers).

For those of us with a taste for historical irony, we've been reminded, thanks to the weblog Jessica's Well (jessicaswell.com), that the eminent novelist John Dos Passos toured post-World War II Europe and declared confidently in the January 7, 1946, issue of Life, "We have swept away Hitlerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease.... Friend and foe alike, look at you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American."

When it comes to Iraq, are war critics (I'm one) pulling a Dos Passos, whose story was breathlessly titled "Americans Are Losing the Victory in Europe"? Or is this really another Vietnam? (Exactly what that means is rarely clear.) Will Iraq be to us what Afghanistan was to the Soviets? Hell, is Afghanistan--a place that is routinely described as both trudging toward democracy and sliding back under the Taliban's...