It's not impossible that they're right

It's just highly unlikely. 

After reminding us of d-squared's dictum that "there is no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of giving known liars the benefit of the doubt'," Scott Lemieux applies it to the Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon's op-ed in the New York Times arguing that things are getting better, "militarily", on the ground in Iraq:

clipped from lefarkins.blogspot.com To take them seriously we would have to trust the ability of the people making the arguments to think critically about the propaganda they're being fed, search very assiduously for disconfirming information, etc.   Given that O'Pollahan have 1)a remarkably extensive history of atrocious misjudgments about the situation in Iraq and the competence of the Bush administration and 2)have an obvious stake in defending the disastrous war their reputations were staked on, that their claims about "on the ground" improvements cannot be trusted is the least that can be said.   The fact that the claims they make that can be assessed with publicly available data continue to have a strong tendency to be tendentious or false makes this even more clear.  It may not be true as a matter of formal logic that it is impossible for them to be right, but I think you'd be smarter to put your money in Baltimore Orioles 2007 World Series futures.

Let's pretend for a moment that a military victory in Iraq is possible without a political solution.  What would it look like? 

It would look a lot of dead Iraqis we could label as al-Qaeda and a big enough drop in American casualties in a time frame chosen specifically to highlight that drop so that serious people could declare that peace with honor had come at last and then it would look like a lot of Bush League triumphalism on the TV.  Such a "victory" may be achievable, but its only point will be to allow George Bush, the neo-cons, and their apologists and enablers in the Media, like O'Hanlon and Pollock, to thump themselves on the chest and roar their manly roars as they hand over the mess they made to the next President.