Remember how quickly it seemed that the words “quagmire” and “Iraq” seemed to become joined after the U.S. invasion some years back? I couldn’t help but chuckle at the headline that the Providence Journal gave to this story: “Obama’s headache in Afghanistan.”
A headache, we can presume, is much preferable to a quagmire. The latter is an unwinnable war (even if history proves it to have been winnable). The former is a mere political difficulty.
Apparently, the key to being a political Superman isn’t to leap tall issues in a single bound, but to make big issues small enough to step around.