Want to see the enormous chasm that separates conservative and leftwing viewpoints? It couldn't be more obvious than these two items, currently making their way through the Blogosphere today. The first, via Instapundit, is this piece that's in the current issue of The American Enterprise magazine:

The War is Over, and We Won
By Karl Zinsmeister

Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another embedded period of reporting. I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside.

Many of the soldiers I spent time with during this spring had also been deployed during the initial invasion back in 2003. Almost universally they talked to me about how much change they could see in the country. They noted progress in the attitudes of the people, in the condition of important infrastructure, in security.

I observed many examples of this myself. Take the two very different Baghdad neighborhoods of Haifa Street and Sadr City. The first is an upper-end commercial district in the heart of downtown. The second is one of Baghdad’s worst slums, on the city’s north edge.

I spent lots of time walking both neighborhoods this spring—something that would not have been possible a year earlier, when both were active war zones, where tanks poured shells into buildings on a regular basis. Today, the primary work of our soldiers in each area is rebuilding sewers, paving roads, getting buildings repaired and secured, supplying schools and hospitals, getting trash picked up, managing traffic, and encouraging honest local governance.

What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over. Egregious acts of terror will continue—in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this critical guerilla war.

This whole thing has been a disaster for the country, for our country, and thee president seems to be disengaged from reality. The debate in Washington, I think, among those who are observing this, with respect, is the president and his team, are they purposefully misleading us, do they understand what a debacle it is but they are lying, or are they so delusional that they think that we are winning this thing. I have no idea which it is. But I'd like to know, but maybe there are two camps, the reality-based people who understand that we are loosing but they are lying to u [sic] and then there's the delusional wing.

To tie this in with two of our earlier posts today, those who deploy the chickenhawk slur should, based on its own internal pretzel logic, agree with someone who's actually been to Iraq recently and seen it with his own eyes.

But they won't--and that's merely the begining of the chasm-like disconnect that separates what Ryan Sager dubbed the Hyperbolic Opposition, and the rest of the country.