Another Prophecy, Fulfilled

Whether you consider Brookings "hard-left" or merely "left-leaning," the New York Times certainly fits the former description, and they actually published this non-defeatist analysis from non-token-righties. If that's any sort of barometer of the slowly turning public opinion tide, what are congressional Democrats going to be able to say or do when September rolls around when even their house media organ is saying, "Give the 'Surge' a chance"?

Do I even have to type it? Crap all over the robust lack of political progress on behalf of the Iraqi government.

-Me, three weeks ago

From today's WaPo:

Declaring the government of Iraq "non-functional," the influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said yesterday that Iraq's parliament should oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his cabinet if they are unable to forge a political compromise with rival factions in a matter of days.

"I hope the parliament will vote the Maliki government out of office and will have the wisdom to replace it with a less sectarian and more unifying prime minister and government," Senator Carl M. Levin (D-MI) said after a three-day trip to Iraq and Jordan.

It doesn't take divine inspiration to predict what these people are going to do once you understand their hopeless mental enslavement to dysfunctional left-wing zealotry. With the military end of the "Surge" working so well that more and more Dems are unable to publicly deny it, attacking the "dysfunctional" Iraqi government is the only cut & run excuse they have left.

It's one step back for them, strategically speaking. Or, if you will, an attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of their own:

The last time the National Assembly had to form a government, it took five months to complete. During that time, Democrats demanded a withdrawal, complaining that the democratic process in Iraq had failed. Toppling Maliki would mean doing that all over again, which would give Democrats the same argument they used the last time if the replacement process took more than a few weeks.

Sounds like the Dems want to force a political unraveling in Iraq rather than political progress. Perhaps that's because political progress there is both real and, of late, accelerating:

[T]he Iraqi Prime Minister has made some recent steps towards building the kind of coalition that could produce those reforms. He has dumped Moqtada al-Sadr in favor of Sadr's opponents in the south, who have been more amenable to better sectarian relations than the Mahdi Army leader. He convinced that group, the Islamic Council, to sign a compact of cooperation with the Kurds. Maliki traveled to Tikrit last week to humble himself before Sunni tribal leaders in Saddam Hussein's former power base, and apparently made good progress.

Maybe it was the fire lit under his ass by threats of American withdrawal that finally motivated al-Maliki, but he is belatedly doing pretty much everything we asked of him. And now, with the Iraqi leader taking proactively positive steps in the right direction, Carl Levin wants to kneecap him and hand the political initiative back to....whom? Former PM Ayad Allawi, who was even more ineffective than al-Maliki? Or, most likely, Moqtada al-Sadr, to whom Shiite parties would probably turn, and therefore restoring the power base of Iran's man in Baghdad, and unraveling most or all of the military progress the Coalition has made in beating down the Iranian-controlled Shiite militias.

The funniest part of this deadly serious issue is congressional Democrats and RINOs getting "annoyed" at the Iraqi parliament taking a month's vacation, just happening to coincide with....Congress' own August recess. I know the Beltway is a bubble, an alternate dimension untio itself, but is it really that difficult for its Donk inhabitants to recognize how their words sound to those of us living in the real world?

I've got a deal to offer Senator Levin: you can order the Iraqi legislature to sack Nouri al-Maliki if you first set a good example and oust Dirty Harry and Crazy Nancy and turn both Houses of Congress back over to the GOP.

Hey, with dog-fighting more popular than the Donk Congress these days, could there be a more effective demonstration of "replac[ing] it with a less sectarian and more unifying....government"?