Washington Post; The Democrats’ Baghdad Two-Step
Washington Post
By Peter Hoekstra
Monday, July 21, 2008; Page A15
It’s hard not to have heard about the positive developments in Iraq lately. On Friday, the White House announced that President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had reached agreement on a “time horizon” for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last Wednesday that “security is unquestionably and remarkably better.” Iraqi security forces recently took responsibility for a 10th province and expect to assume responsibility for all 18 of the country’s provinces by year-end. There have been virtually no sectarian killings in 10 weeks. The Iraqi government has made important progress in political reconciliation. Regional neighbors are reestablishing embassies in Baghdad, and some of Iraq’s creditors have begun to forgive the enormous debts incurred by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Why are the Democrats in denial about recent gains in Iraq?
Indeed, they are so opposed to acknowledging America’s hard-won achievements that in a May 28 interview Pelosi credited “the goodwill of the Iranians” for “some of the success of the surge. . . . They decided in Basra when the fighting would end.” As Sen. Joe Lieberman noted in a speech last year, “Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’s new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq.”
Sen. Barack Obama’s (current) position on Iraq is hard to nail down.
He still favors the same arbitrary 16-month withdrawal timetable he promoted when violence in Iraq was at a high point. After insisting for months that the troop surge was doomed to fail, Obama now credits it with some security improvements while simultaneously claiming in a speech last week that the surge did not meet all of its benchmarks and was too expensive. Setting aside Obama’s verbal acrobatics on Iraq, his campaign was caught last week trying to purge his earlier harsh criticism of the surge from its Web site.
