Over at The Danger Room, Noah Shachtman asks how on earth Americans might describe the war in Iraq as “going well,” as 30 percent of Americans did last month in response to a survey by the Pew Research Center. No one can speak for those folks, and short of a follow-on survey by Pew, we just won’t know what they were thinking. But I’ll take the bait. The first explanation is the easiest, and it fits best with our timeline: there is likely a substantial portion of the American public that understand Iraq to be the central front in the war on terror. Within that context, the sacrifice of so many men and so much materiel is not viewed as disproportionate to the threat we face from the likes of al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq. To these folks, and count me among them, “going well” means it’s well enough that the United States military is there killing and capturing bad guys day in and day out, and “not going well” would mean the humiliation of a Congressionally mandated defeat and retreat and a correspondingly emboldened al Qaeda. Dean Barnett captured this sentiment writing today on the four year anniversary of the war.