Winning in Iraq

One of the most amazing developments in American politics over the last month or so is how progress with Iraq's surge strategy is twisting the antiwar forces in knots. Victor Davis Hanson has an interesting article up today at RealClearPolitics that digs down into the issue a bit. Here's a snippet:

In September, Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, will issue a status report on the war to Congress. Experts then will study quality-of-life issues in Iraq, such as the status of water, power and sewage services. American casualty figures will be weighed against a sense of improving or worsening security. And we will again examine the Iraqi government's ability to provide effective anti-terrorist forces and relieve some of our responsibilities.

But in the meantime, the American public can look to more subtle indicators to get some sense of Gen. Petraeus' current progress or failure.

Do Democratic opposition leaders keep blaming each other for voting for the Iraq war? Or are they now talking about expanding military operations to other countries? Sen. Hillary Clinton once was damned for voting to authorize the war in Iraq. But her even more liberal rival Sen. Barrack Obama, D-Ill., now expresses his own willingness to invade nuclear Islamic Pakistan.

Do anti-war politicians frequently proclaim our defeat in Iraq -- or instead worry that the war might be won? In the spring, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced Iraq was lost, the surge a failure and Gen. Petraeus not "in touch." We haven't seen Sen. Reid much lately.

But we have heard from the House's majority whip, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C. He's worried that Gen. Petraeus' good news about the surge might be "a real problem for us" -- "us" being anti-war Democrats. And at a congressional briefing, when Gen. Jack Keane reviewed the positive signs from the surge, Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Kan., walked out on the testimony. She complained that there was "only so much that you could take . . . after so much of the frustration of having to listen to what we listened to."

What do we hear from those who cited our success in the initial war but then wrote of the chaos of the occupation? Democratic analysts Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack recently returned from Iraq to co-author a New York Times op-ed entitled "A War We Just Might Win." Respected veteran New York Times reporter John Burns believes that the surge has markedly improved security in Iraq.

Has furor over President Bush's Iraq war and larger anti-terror campaign resulted in concrete Democratic action -- or remained largely rhetorical? Well, so far, there has been no legislation passed that would bring home the troops right now, close down Guantanamo or repeal the Patriot Act. Since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip to Damascus, there have been no more Democratic forays into Middle East foreign policy to seek an alternative to present administration policies.

Constantly changing positions on the war should not be surprising when we remember that a vast majority of American people -- and most Democrats in Congress -- were in favor of invading Iraq just four years ago. And current polls show that over the past few weeks, Americans are not as pessimistic that the surge won't work.

Of course, we all have political biases and innately different views about what brings about war and peace, making disagreement inevitable. And there is always a fog of war that makes it hard to determine the pulse of any ongoing battle.

Yet the universal human desire to be associated in the here and now with the assumed winning side -- and to shun perceived defeat -- trumps them all. Throughout this war, that natural urge explains most of the volatile and shifting views of our politicians, pundits and media as they scramble to readjust to the up-and-down daily news from Iraq.

And so it is with the latest positioning about the surge that to a variety of observers seems successful -- at least for now.

I love the part about Representative Boyda walking out on Keane's testimony! Boyda's just like the hardcore radicals who won't appeal to reason when thinking about this war. The Democrats are having fits with this stuff!

Noteworthy too is Hanson's citation of O'Hanlon and Pollack's piece in the New York Times last week.

I occasionally post on O'Hanlon's Iraq reports, because while he's with a left-leaning think tank, he's objective in his analysis. O'Hanlon's one of the top academic experts on the military nowadays, and for him to say we're on the way to winning in Iraq is a major acknowledgement of the surge's progress.