Change Of Tone

There appears to be a change in tone over at the Washington Post about withdrawing from Iraq. Even David Ignatius - not someone you would call a supporter of the war - is pointing out that the strident voices of the politicians pandering to the left are damaging American credibility in the world.

A good start would be for Washington partisans to take deep breaths and lower the volume, so that the process of talking and fighting that must accompany a gradual U.S. withdrawal can work. Some members of Congress argue that pressure for an American troop withdrawal will persuade the Iraqis to put aside their sectarian agendas, but the opposite is more likely to be true.

Try for a moment to put yourself in the place of the Iraqi Shiite warlord Moqtada al-Sadr. The American representatives in Baghdad, Crocker and Petraeus, keep calling on him to disarm his Mahdi Army militia and defuse Iraq's sectarian war. But Sadr can read the stories coming out of Washington. He sees the daily clamor for American troops to come home, and he knows that in the brutal reality of Iraq, this is the time to stockpile weapons for his militia, not disband it.

Even the good news that people have been touting in Iraq — the new willingness of Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province to ally with the United States against al-Qaeda — is in part a warm-up for the civil war that's coming. The Sunni leaders are working with the Americans so that they, too, can stockpile arms for the coming conflict. We are, in effect, arming both sides for this sectarian battle. And not for the first time, either — recall U.S. military support to both Iraq and Iran during their brutal war in the 1980s.

Extricating the United States safely from Iraq will be difficult under the best of circumstances. But it will be impossible if the necessary bargaining takes place against a backdrop of continual congressional demands for a faster withdrawal. In that situation, the Qomis and Sadrs will take the admonitions from Crocker and Petraeus as just so much hot air — and a bad situation will get even worse. Why should they listen to us today if we will be gone tomorrow?

Ed Morrisey agress that the "troops out now" rhetoric is killing American credibility, but he disputes - rather strenuously - Ignatius' central point that America has too short an attention span to deal with a long war.

And this is where Ignatius gets it wrong, at least historically. He quotes retired Air Force General Chuck Boyd as saying that we have never won a war that lasted longer than four years, with the exception of the Revolutionary War, when we were the insurgents. That's simply not true. In fact, we won the first war we fought in the Middle East, in the so-called Barbary Pirates war. It took us eighteen years to force submission from the radical Islamists in North Africa. It took us several years of Reconstruction (overly brutal years) to subdue the South after four years of civil war, which in large part was a counterinsurgency campaign. We prevailed in both Korea and Vietnam, although in the latter a Democratic Congress betrayed an agreement to support the South Vietnamese after we agreed to defend them if Hanoi violated the peace accord in 1973.

And we won the Cold War, which lasted 45 years, and we did that just 17 years ago.

Americans can show fortitude when needed. We need to do so now, or the result of our withdrawal will be a disgrace that will make Rwanda and Srebrenica look like schoolyard fistfights, in a region where we have critical national interests.

I agree with the good captain on this. But back to the change in tone. WaPo is also running this article today:

As Recess Nears, Disputes Linger

Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.), whose frustration with the war has been growing even as he has bucked his leadership's efforts to end it, last week joined his friend and fellow conservative Democrat in the Senate, Ben Nelson (Neb.), to support legislation in the House that would mandate a change of mission in Iraq, without setting firm withdrawal dates for troops.

Moderate Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) may not have made headway in her push to begin bringing troops home, but a bipartisan breakfast meeting Tuesday with senators fed up with recrimination and deadlock over the war gave her hope that the Senate may yet find a way out of its own quagmire.

WaPo appears to be backing away from a troops out mentality and leaning toward a compromise position. They have already recognized that a sudden withdrawal would unleash a genocide on Iraq. It would appear that they are changing course in how they cover the news. From the above article, it would appear that they are going to be giving negative coverage to those politicians that pander to the left, just as they will to those leaning right.