From Iraqpundit:

Are my aunt and her neighbors kidding themselves out of desperation? That’s possible; it’s hard to live without hope, and people can be creative at manufacturing reasons to be optimistic. (Though the truth is that Iraqis are not, as a rule, an optimistic group, and are inclined by cultural habit to see things darkly. But that’s another story.) It’s true that the murderers in Iraq are still at work. On the other hand, I’m far more inclined to take seriously a picture of Baghdad that comes from a life-long Baghdadi than one coming from a Westerner who has parachuted into town for a while, and who doesn’t speak the language.

Yet Iraqis who desperately want to lead normal lives are not the only ones with an incentive to interpret events in their own interests. If one listens to the usual suspects among certain journalists, academics, and politicians, the ongoing crackdown is futile and doomed to fail. But that’s a conclusion that many of these figures reached even before the security sweep began. In other words, some of the crackdown’s critics have created incentives, professional and personal, to perceive Iraqi and American failure. People can be creative at manufacturing reasons to be pessimistic, too.