Surging To Defeat
Daniel Henninger of the Opinion Journal has his weekly column out. In it, he details the tale of two surges. The troop surge in Iraq and the surge the Democrats are orchestrating toward defeat in that war. He points out something that appears to have escaped the notice of the Democratic leadership. If they bet wrong, they are in serious, serious trouble. (I've been pointing that out all along.)
Carried aloft on the gassy fumes of politics, the congressional Democrats may be overshooting on Iraq. Six months from now, they may wish they had been more temperate. Helped finally by the right U.S. military strategy, the Iraq nightmare might be ebbing. Then what?
No such thought intrudes today on Democratic politics. Buoyed by President Bush's 30-something approval and with disaffection over the war at 60%, Senate Majority Leader Reid can promise to sign on to Russ Feingold's pull-the-plug bill; and House Speaker Pelosi, as if making foie gras, can cram an Iraq-withdrawal bill down the gullets of her chamber's membership. The polls are with Harry and Nancy. What can go wrong?
What could go wrong is that the U.S. military's "surge" could go right. The surge, led by Gen. David Petraeus and formally known as the Baghdad Security Plan, is a real strategy being executed by real people on the ground in Iraq. For the past several months, since President Bush announced the plan, the Democratic leadership has acted as if this effort were so irrelevant as to not exist. Why bother? The House leadership has its own "surge" up and running in Washington against the enemy in the White House.
The Democrats are betting everything on a defeat. I honestly do not believe the American voters gave them a mandate to lose a war. But they are pressing ahead, ignoring all the things they promised to get elected in the first place. The voters will remember that when the next election rolls around. And if the surge in Iraq does start to turn things around enough that the media can no longer ignore it (as ABC News is already reporting) then the defeat the Democrats are surging toward may well be their own. Surprisingly, Barack Obama was the first Democrat to talk a bit of sense about funding the troops - he was promptly savaged by Kos and Kompany for doing so. He may end up as one of the few to benefit if the current Democratic surge turns into a disaster for the party. (And the fact that the major media is turning on Nancy Pelosi is an indication that this may be turning into that disaster very rapidly.)
By jpg, Thursday, 5 April , 2007 @ 9:02 am
If the surge works and we do get some sort of satisfactory victory in Iraq, I think the democrats will just claim credit for it. They will say that victory came from them putting the administration’s and the military’s feet to the fire with the push for deadlines and funding limitations. That’s what worked, they’ll claim. If it wasn’t for the democrats and their big push, the war would have continued to meander on with no end in sight. The lefty media will stick up for the dems and trumpet that line to the exclusion of all else. The dems will “win.”