How goes the war?

OPINION:

How is the war going? It all depends on who’s talking — or writing. Do you go with the doubters-at-a-distance who have been saying the war was lost even before it began? Or with the separate but equally sure experts who have been assuring us we’re on the verge of victory — for years now.

We scan the headlines looking for hope. Should we take heart from the latest news out of Anbar Province, where Sunni chieftains have finally decided to team up with the Americans against the terrorists who have been horning in on their traditional territory? The change there has been the most dramatic — and most welcome — of the war’s various ups and downs and sideways.

Remember when Anbar was the Triangle of Death, and even the professional optimists were admitting it was lost? It hasn’t been too long — just last year — since the Marine Corps’ chief of intelligence was quoted in The Washington Post as having given up hope for that province. He was said to have concluded the prospects of securing the Sunni heartland “are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the situation there.”

But that was before Gen. David Petraeus took command of Coalition forces, and before the surge he had planned — and the 30,000 additional troops he’d requested to carry it out — had begun to have their effect. It was also before it had become clear that al Qaeda had overplayed its hand, as fanatics always do, by trying to push around the local sheiks. Things now look as good in Anbar as they looked bad a year ago.

The pendulum has swung — but could swing back again. War is uncertain hell. As an American general named Eisenhower once noted, “Every war will surprise you.” This one certainly has. Again and again.

Predictions about the war’s outcome have been about as steady this year as the stock market. Which trends will pan out, which won’t? Which are the true indicators, which fleeting and false? Whom to believe? Is there no one simple way to discern which way things are going, no single index of progress in the field or lack thereof?

Yes, there is. Watch which way Hillary Clinton is going on the war. Through it all, from her vote in favor of this war to her latest vow to end it, her statements have been a reliable reflection of how the war seemed to be going at any given time: She voted to confirm Gen. Petraeus for his new command and fourth star when he represented a hopeful change in American strategy in Iraq. Later, when hope had ebbed, and she had to compete with the likes of Barack Obama and John Edwards in antiwar fervor — the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is well under way — she would tell Gen. Petraeus it would require a “suspension of disbelief” to credit what he — and the chief American envoy in Iraq, too — were saying about the war.

Last month, with reports from the field showing some progress, Mrs. Clinton voted to vaguely condemn MoveOn.org’s attack on the general (“General Betray Us”) before declining to vote for another resolution that defended him specifically. And so she goes, like a political pendulum.

Conclusion: You can tell how the war is going, or at least how Americans think it is going, by following Mrs. Clinton’s every twist and turn on the issue.

This much can be confidently predicted: Hillary Clinton will never abandon our troops in their hour of victory — any more than she’ll support the war when it looks like a losing cause. In that way, she’s been perfectly consistent.

Will the senator now from New York, and front-runner in the Democratic race for the presidential nomination, wind up supporting the war? It depends on how well it seems to be going at the time. That is why the thought does not assure of Hillary Clinton as wavering commander-in-chief of the armed forces after noon Jan. 20, 2009.

One is reminded of her spouse’s stand, or rather his carefully crafted lack of one, on the first war against Saddam Hussein — the one fought over Kuwait in 1991. Bill Clinton’s stand on that war was so flexible that, whichever way it had come out, he could claim his views had been vindicated. And did. By now that political strategy has become a family tradition.

There is more involved here than the outcome of a presidential race or even of the campaigns in Anbar or Afghanistan. We now stand at the beginning of another generational struggle akin to the Cold War, which turned hot from time to time, too. Throughout that long struggle, decade after decade, there was only one sure guide that in the end saw freedom through: constancy of purpose. That is easy enough to say, it is bloody hard to maintain.

Paul Greenberg is a nationally syndicated columnist.