From Our Mouths To Hillary's Ears

Brendan Miniter in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

It should now be clear - if it wasn't already - that the Democratic Party is the party of withdrawal. Had John Kerry won the election last year, the U.S. would today be packing its bags and preparing to leave Iraq under something similar to the Murtha plan. The fallout from that would be disastrous. "Rapid reaction force" or not, Iraq would descend into political chaos and then perhaps fall under the power of a dictator. Maybe Saddam Hussein himself would return, though there is no shortage of Saddam wannabes in that part of the world. Following that, no U.S. president for a generation or maybe two would have the political muscle to topple a rogue regime anywhere. In the meantime, the U.S. would be on the run, while terrorists and the dictators who nurture them would have the upper hand.

It turns out, however, that the politics of national security favor staying the course....

Victor Davis Hanson at NRO today:

[A]re the metrics of this war in the terrorists’ or our favor? Are the Iraqi security forces growing or shrinking? Are elections postponed or on schedule? Are Europe, Jordan, Lebanon, and others more or less sympathetic to a war against Islamic terrorism in Iraq? Are bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Zarqawi more or less popular or secure after we removed Saddam? Is al Qaeda in a strengthened or weakened position? Is the Arab world more or less receptive to democracy in the Gulf, Egypt, Lebanon, and the West Bank? And is the United States more or less vulnerable to a terrorist attack as we go into our fifth year since September 11?

I ask those questions in all sincerity since the conventional wisdom — compared to the true wisdom and compassion of those valiantly fighting the terrorists under the most impossible of conditions — is that we are losing in Iraq, our enemies are emboldened, and the Arab world has turned against us. But if we forget the banality of New York Times columnists, the admonitions of NPR experts, and the daily rants of a Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, or Al Gore, more sober and street-smart Democrats are in fact not so sure of these answers.

Hillary Clinton, yesterday:

Senatory Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be "a big mistake."

The New York Democrat said she respects Representative Jack Murtha, D-PA, the Vietnam veteran and "hawkish" ex-Marine who last week called for an immediate troop pullout. But she added: "I think that would cause more problems for us in America."

"It will matter to us if Iraq totally collapses into civil war, if it becomes a failed state the way Afghanistan was, where terrorists are free to basically set up camp and launch attacks against us," she said.

And she's running for president, folks.

The other day I posited a theory that some elected Democrats, knowing that the mission in Iraq is succeeding and the troops will, accordingly, start coming home next year, are pushing the "let's get out of Iraq immediately" line to try and get out in front of it so they can spin it as the President being forced to bow to their prescient demands for withdrawal.

Now try this alternative on for size: other Democrats, also knowing that the mission in Iraq is succeeding and in a desperate panic that the President will reap a bonanza of political capital from the victory processionals and being right all along and having hung tough despite all their despicably dishonest ankle-biting, are trying to stampede us into a pell-mell retreat in order to pull a last-minute defeatist rabbit out of the proverbial hat and inflict a disastrous failure on the Bush Administration that they can then use against the Republicans a year from now.

With the Bushies now, finally, returning fire against their "critics," making the war debate an actual debate again instead of the lopsided beating in absentia it's been for the past year, and the likely uptick that showing a PR pulse will provide to the President's poll numbers, time is running out for the Moore-ons, Sorosians, and Kos-hacks and their puppets in Congress and the Extreme press.

And so, as VDH concludes:

[T]hese wiser ones wait and hedge their wagers. They give full rein to the usefully idiotic and irresponsible in their midst, but make no move yet to undo what thousands of brave American soldiers have accomplished in Iraq.

What exactly is that? Despite acrimony at home, the politics of two national elections and a third on the horizon, and the slander of war crimes and incompetence, those on the battlefield of Iraq have almost pulled off the unthinkable — the restructuring of the politics of the Middle East in less than three years. And for now that is still a strong hand to bet against.

Especially if you aspire to return to the White House from whence you came.