The familiar image above is the graphic that accompanies H.D.S. Greenway's Globe op-ed today, and it tells you all you need to know about the content of the piece: How will the Iraq war end?

A half page editorial of predictable hash. This is the product of an ageing left's pathology, not analysis. Wishful thinking carried through to the front and editorial pages. No matter how successful the Iraq effort is, Globe readers will never know, because that image there is the paradigm that it will all be framed through.

Simplistic analogies are easy, but not always accurate. To take one example from the piece: "But Bush today, as did Lyndon Johnson before him, vows to fight on until victory, and some of the same ridiculous rhetoric prevails -- such as that we are fighting them there so we won't have to fight them at home." Well, yes, somehow I think every leader of every war has much such vows of victory...so what? The choice to compare Iraq to Vietnam in this case says nothing about our reality, and everything about the psychology of the author.

This kind of thing reminds me of those oh-so-clever essays exposing the hidden sexual content of everything from The Lord of the Rings to children's nursury rhymes. Look hard enough and you can find it. One might expect a higher level of mature analysis in a half-page Globe opinion piece...or not.