The article is written on another level of logic, I thought it was interesting to show the difference between this interpretation and that of the neo cons. Moderates tend to think in shades of grey and most of the facts they talk about are like this article, small setbacks and improvements. Neocons had this vision that everything was this black and white argument, good versus evil and that all these grey shades could be ignored.
So now there is this enormous gulf between two kinds of articles you read. There's no big picture with Margolis, it's all the small things adding up to what he calls a mess. The Neocons try to avoid all these kinds of points and reduce the argument to black/white. For example is Saddam in power or not? Is the army in control of Iraq or not? Is the war affordable or not?
With those kinds of black and white arguments you can construct a policy but the shades of grey arguments don't go away, they tend to form a grey quagmire.
It's the same with the grand sounding drug war which sounds good in terms of good and evil. The problem there is everyone has a relative who takes drugs and they don't think he is evil. So the consensus of the community is that drug takers and small time pushers aren't very evil and so they don't turn them in. So the drug war really founders on the fact that for the most part people don't see drug takers as evil enough to eradicate. The enemy isn't black enough, but a mixture of good citizens who do bad drugs sometimes. This murky enemy turns the drug war into a quagmire. It locks up the clearly evil ones but can't handle the shades of grey of the users so the demand is never shut down.
It's the same when you end up in somewhere like Iraq. You don't know how is shooting, it could be the same people smiling and waving a minute before. Likewise guerillas typically have support of the people as they are someone's relation. So once you try to classify them as evil you have that problem because the people there don't consider the guerillas as very evil. So they protect them and they can't be rooted out without more black/white drastic measures which turns more people into guerilllas, just like Vietnam and most South American countries at some stage.
The problem arises from trying to handle these grey problems like a black and white problem. Since all Bush has is this moral clarity (which is another name for excluded middle logic) he can't deal with grey problems because he doesn't concede they exist or are important. Statements like you are with us or with the terrorists is excluded middle logic because it implies there is nothing in between which is not true. People get pushed into the terrorist camp because there is no other hole to put the peg into. People get threatened by soldiers in reprisals because if they aren't turning in the terrorists then they must be terrorists themselves. So the need to put the citizens of Iraq into a good or evil classification with nothing in between means they end up as evil There's no mechanism for people leaning towards doing bad things to move them away from that. To work with this middle group of people who are good but sympathetic to guerillas you have to work with shades of grey. If the policy refuses to believe greys exist then nothing is done in this middle, which falls apart from neglect. You can't solve a problem if your definitions assume it doesn't exist.
This dilemma is as old as logic itself. When logic was first invented this problem of the excluded middle came up, how to handle situations where you exclude all those shades of grey to acquire that moral clarity. You end up in this struggle for power between the extremists and the moderates, which is why many articles are against Bush. Most of them aren't really leftist but they are talking about information the neo con extremists don't think is important.
Often people who think in this excluded middle way fail because the shades of grey problems end up dominating. Sometimes the opposite happens, that people think too much in these greys and some black/white reasoning is needed. A lot of people believed that was true after 9/11. Now the situation is turning back into this grey mess, and it can't be solved without nuance, and Bush doesn't do nuance.