Turns Out That Summer Really Didn't Make a Difference

Cross-posted from The Oxford Medievalist:

I find it highly amusing that Senate Democrats, whilst incessantly deriding the surge as the same old failed strategy and urging a "change of course" in Iraq, can't seem to shake their own failed strategy in Congress. Instead of seeking compromise in the wake of General Petraeus', and Ambassador Crocker's, testimonies, the Politico reports that Senate Democrats will continue their failed strategy of pushing for, among other things that won't pass, a hard timetable for withdrawal. The Democrats' ability to compromise was always predicated on their ability to peel wavering Republicans to their side, and now that seems unlikely given that GOP leaders are committed to giving General Petraeus until March to continue the surge. It's no surprise, then, that the Democratic agenda is spearheaded by the ever-courageous Blind Harry, who sounds positively childish:

"We haven't found much movement with the Republicans. They seem to be sticking with the president," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday. "I think they've decided they definitely want this to be the Republican Senate's war, not just Bush's [war]. They're jealous. They don't want him to have it as only his war."

Similarly shocking is Senator Carl Levin's (D-Mich.) attempt to portray the Democrats' stand as a matter of principle, as opposed to simply a matter of what MoveOn.org wants:

"We want to vote on something we believe in before we move on," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "There could be people who vote for this who didn't before."

Meanwhile, as the Democrats plan for more symbolic gestures to their anti-war base, that base is getting rather restless. The frustration has some anti-war activists, indeed has some Democrats, wondering aloud if the anti-war base should turn its sights on Democratic members of Congress who are not more aggressively challenging the GOP. Tom Matzzie, head of the anti-war coalition Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), thought by now that the offensive his coalition was about to launch against Republicans at the start of the summer was

"going to smash their heads against their base and flush them down the toilet,” Matzzie said in April.

Yet here we are almost six months later and progress continues to be made in Iraq and the Democrats have nothing to offer other than "more of the same."

Sound familiar?

Cross-posted from The Oxford Medievalist.

Poll Finds Partisan Reactions to Petraeus

Via Memeorandum: A new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that Americans view favorably the proposals of General David Petraeus on Iraq progress and expected troop withdrawals in 2008:

Last week's congressional testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, followed by President Bush's address to the nation, has not changed bottom-line public attitudes toward the war in Iraq. However, there has been a modest increase in positive views about the U.S. military effort, accompanied by largely positive public reactions to General Petraeus' recommendations.

Most Americans (57%) who heard at least something about Petraeus' report say they approve of his recommendations for troop withdrawals, which President Bush has endorsed.

Yet, beyond the broad numbers, what is deeply striking about this survey is the clear partisanship surrounding evaluations of Petraeus' accuracy and impartiality, as well as other issues:

About three-quarters of Republicans (76%) and half of independents who heard about the report believe that Gen. Petraeus was accurately describing the current situation in Iraq. Reaction among Democrats is more skeptical. Just a third of Democrats say he accurately described the situation while 49% say he made things seem better than they really are.

Democrats clearly evince more robust antiwar (or anti-military) tendencies in the poll:

Two-thirds (67%) of Republicans today believe the U.S. is making progress in defeating the insurgents in Iraq, up from 53% in February. But very few Democrats (16%) or independents (31%) agree with this assessment, and views have remained unchanged throughout the year. Similarly, Republicans have become substantially more optimistic about progress in preventing a civil war, while Democrats and independents remain generally gloomy. And while there has been an across-the-board rise in optimism about reducing the number of civilian casualties, the gains are far more substantial among Republicans. As a result of these differences, the partisan divide in outlook about the war is far larger now than at the start of the year.

More partisanship can be seen in the findings on those supporting a troop drawdown. While a majority of Americans (54 percent) favors a troop pullout, only 18 percent favor an immediate drawdown. Thirty-four percent favor withdrawing troops over the next year or two.

If the 34 percent figure is added to those who favor keeping U.S. forces in Iraq (39 percent), a full 73 percent of Americans supports maintaining the deployment over the next couple of years, with only a gradual pullout!

This interpretation of the data is not what most people will find in the press, and especially not among hard left bloggers (see, for example, Daily Kos' interpretation of the findings, or those at the Talking Points Memo.)

The fact remains that Americans want to ensure a stable Iraq before removing American troops from the country.

Take a look at more of the data. A deep partisan divide characterizes support for the war, but general trends are favorable: The numbers of Americans seeing progess on military goals are going up. The numbers of Americans seeing a reduction in civilian casualties are going up. The numbers seeing increased progress in defeating the insurgency are going up!

The United States is making progess in this war, and the public recognizes it.

A balanced assessment of the opinion environment on Iraq requires one to go beyond assessment of Petraeus' likeability to the hard numbers evaluating success on the ground. The evidence is striking. These data should be trumpeted by the media and across the blogosphere. There's no call for a precipitous withrawal from Iraq, and Americans recognize the clear, substantial gains being achieved under the administration's strategic and tactical adjustments.

The Defining Moment of the Antiwar Faction

Peter Feaver, in yesterday's Boston Globe, compared MoveOn.org's attempt to inpugn General David Petraeus to that of Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy started his downhill slide to self-destruction after Army lawyer Joseph Welch challenged him, saying:

You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

That's exactly what we should be saying to MoveOn.org after the publication of their advertisment attacking Petraeus' credibility:

The MoveOn.org ad is vicious, and would garner comment even if it were merely one more primal scream in the coarse blogosphere debate over Iraq. But it is not an angry e-mail or blog entry. It is a deliberate attack on the senior Army commander, in a major daily newspaper, with the intention of destroying as much of his credibility as possible so that his military advice could be more easily rejected by antiwar members of Congress.

The attack was part of an elaborate effort to undermine public support for the Iraq war, and was foreshadowed by an unnamed Democratic senator who told a reporter, "No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV . . . The expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us." The effort is funded by powerful special interests, and has all the trappings of a major political campaign.

Precisely because it is so vicious, so public, and so deliberate, the attack on Petraeus cannot be ignored by either side in the Iraq debate.

Feaver perfectly captures my feelings on MoveOn's underhanded attacks, not to mention the hard left's entire antiwar smear campaign on the Bush administration's surge strategy.

This is the "defining moment of the antiwar faction," notes Feaver.

Let me stress Feaver's key point: It's vital for clear-headed thinkers to rebut these attacks. I will continue to speak out against such despicable smear campaigns, and I urge my readers to pick up attention to these attacks in their work.

Click here for the Washington Post's photo image of MoveOn's New York Times attack ad.

For a printable PDF version of the ad, check this post over at Hoystory.

Democrats Launch New Assault on Petraeus Report

The Los Angeles Times reports the new tack of congressional Democrats to deligitimize the highly anticipated Petraeus Report:

Launching a new assault on the president's war strategy, congressional Democrats have begun to dismiss the Bush administration claims of military progress as unreliable spin ahead of Monday's testimony from the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

In a shift from recent comments that the military buildup appeared to be making some gains, Democrats are now questioning the statistics being used to back up the reports of progress.

They are also increasingly casting Army Gen. David H. Petraeus' upcoming report as a product of the White House rather than an independent analysis by a top military commander.

"By carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working," said Illinois Sen. Richard J. Durbin, his chamber's No. 2 Democrat, in a speech Friday in Washington. "Even if the figures were right, the conclusion is wrong."

The attacks are not without political risk for Democrats, who are sensitive to accusations of not supporting the troops and who have sought to avoid criticizing the military as they have declared the Iraq war a lost cause. Their new criticisms imply doubt about the credibility of a general who less than eight months ago won Senate confirmation as the top U.S. military commander in Iraq without a single dissenting vote.

Durbin said he did not want to question Petraeus' integrity: "I respect him very much. And I believe he is an extremely competent military leader who has been given an almost impossible military assignment."

The Democratic rhetoric in advance of Petraeus' scheduled testimony Monday before two House committees underscores how polarized the war debate in Washington remains. It also highlights how deeply congressional Democrats distrust the Bush administration.

This is an interesting development. At the same time that moderates of both parties are recognizing progress on the ground, and negotiating future plans on reducing the numbers of troops deployed, the most hardline antiwar foes in Congress are bucking such trends for pure partisan gain.

Rahm Emanuel's remarks at the end of the Times piece are classic:

"Instead of a new strategy for Iraq, the Bush administration is cherry-picking the data to support their political objectives and preparing a report that will offer another defense of the president's strategy," Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, said in a floor speech Friday.

"We don't need a report that wins the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction."

Read the whole article. I would think Emanuel - as one of the top congressional Democrats - might show a little more leadership and little less partisanhip on this issue. His comments are especially interesting, given how the article notes that Petraeus will seek to provide testimony from the perspective of pure military objectivity.

Update: I have removed the Photobucket image from the top of this post. After doing some fact-checking, I've discovered the quote found in that image is not Abraham Lincoln's, but intead is attributed to a conservative scholar named J. Michael Waller, who claims the false attribution to President Lincoln was the result of a copy-editing error.

Darn it too, because I thought the "arrested, exiled, or hanged" line added some nice spice to my entry!

Measuring Success in Iraq

Frederick Kagan, in the Weekly Standard, provides a nice analysis of the Government Accounting Office's recent pessimistic report on progress in Iraq.

Kagan argues that the report is badly flawed in its focus on benchmarks that are unrepresentative of the changing security situation on the ground:

The GAO report reflects everything that has been wrong with the discussion about Iraq since the end of 2006. Through no fault of the GAO's, the organization was sent on a fool's errand by Congress. Its mandate was not to evaluate progress in Iraq, but to determine whether or not the Iraqi government had met the 18 benchmarks. As a result, as the report repeatedly notes, the GAO was forced to fit an extraordinarily complicated reality into a black-and-white, yes-or-no simplicity. In addition, the GAO's remit extended only to evaluating progress on the Congressionally-sanctioned 18 benchmarks, 14 of which were established between eight and 11 months ago in a very different context. As a result, the report ignores completely a number of crucial positive developments that were not foreseen when the benchmarks were established and that, in fact, offer the prospect of a way forward that is much more likely to succeed than the year-old, top-down concept the GAO was told to measure. As the situation in Iraq has been changing dynamically over the past eight months, as American strategy and operations, both military and political, have been adjusting on the ground to new realities, the debate in Washington has remained mired in the preconceptions and approaches of 2006. The GAO report epitomizes this fact.

A number of commentators have already pointed out the absurdity of measuring whether or not the Iraqis had accomplished benchmarks rather than considering their progress toward doing so. Even the GAO found that task ridiculous, which is why, after criticism from the Departments of State and Defense, it invented the category of "partially met" as a third option, a category not foreseen in the legislation mandating the report.

One of the most striking things about the GAO Report is its failure to take adequate notice of the Anbar Awakening and the general movement within the Sunni Arab community against Al Qaeda In Iraq and toward the Coalition. "Anbar" appears twice in the document, both times in a comment noting that violence has fallen in that province, but without reference to the turn of the Sunni population against the terrorists. That omission is unfathomable considering the significance of the movement among Sunnis over precisely the time in which the GAO was researching and producing this report. During the same period in which the report's authors note that they were in Iraq, I was also in Iraq, and received detailed briefings on the Sunni movement not only in Anbar, but also in Diyala, Baghdad, and Babil provinces. It is difficult to imagine that the GAO authors did not receive similar briefings, but even harder to understand why, if they did, they made no mention of the phenomenon. Of course, the Congressionally-mandated benchmarks take no account of the grassroots Sunni movement, and so made it difficult for the GAO to bring them into the picture.

Read the whole thing. Kagan provide a compelling case against the report, focusing not only on the GAO, but on the Congress itself, which is just jonesing for some negative studies on which to mount a smear campaign against the Petraeus Report out this month.

War opponents just lap up any negative news coming out of Iraq, and they're resistant to any indicators that confirm military assessments of improving conditions in defeating al Qaeda and sectarian insurgents.

Here's an example: Representative Barbara Lee, a San Franciso Democrat, and the only Member of Congress from either chamber to vote against the authorization of force after 9/11, has an attack on the administration's Iraq policy in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

What the debate about military progress really does is serve as a distraction - a smokescreen - put forth by an administration that finds it rhetorically convenient to speak in terms of "victory" and "defeat."

It serves to obscure the basic, fundamental fact that there is no military solution to the situation in Iraq. Our troops are trapped in a civil war and occupation, a situation where there can be no "victory." Our continued presence there is not only breaking our military, it is undermining our national security and our efforts to fight international terrorism.

Members of the Bush administration understand this, just as they understand that there are no pretty or clean options for bringing a responsible end to our policy there. They are content to mouth the words of victory while they try to run out the clock, playing a cynical game of political "chicken," where whoever acts to bring a responsible end to their failed policy will be accused of having lost Iraq.

Lee's sentiment represents much of the hard-line radical opinion of U.S. prospects in the war.

The U.S. and Iraqi forces have reached a critical stage in beating back al Qaeda, crushing sectarian barbarianism, and building indigenous tribal support for the mission. The Democrats and their hard-line antiwar allies will continue to ignore the new realities on the ground.

A victory over the nihilist forces intent to destroy Iraq's infant democracy is entirely reachable at this point. One would think that the Democrats would be cheering the hard work of all the security personnel fighting for a better Iraq future. Instead, we see more and more inventive ways to smear the adminstration and poison public opinion, just as we are closing in on our goals.