Maliki Catching Up To Petraeus

Slip sliding away, slip sliding away,

You know the nearer your destination, the more you slip sliding away

- Simon & Garfunkel

~ ~ ~

It was all right in their grasp. November 2006 gave them control of Congress back; with that control they would wield the pursestrings to the hated George Bush's war for oil and fascism, as well as the power to topple him and is evil puppetmaster Dick Cheney from office and impose regime-change where it was really needed - in Washington, D.C.

For the Democrat Party, the reality has diverged sickeningly from the dream.

Respective caucus leaders "Crazy Nancy" Pelosi and "Dirty Harry" Reid, while long on blustering rhetoric, have been short on concrete anti-war action. They've indulged in many a non-binding resolution that have been nothing more than publicity stunts. They tried to sneakily bleed funding for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to no concrete avail. In their most serious attempt at forcing "a change of direction" in American war policy, they played fifteen weeks' worth of "chicken" with the White House over a critical supplemental war appropriations bill, trying to make the President accept binding retreat timetables. But Dubya called their bluff and vetoed their bill; Donk leaders blinked and caved; and the war raged on.

Last month the success of that war, in the form of the "Surge" strategy of General David Petraus, the Iraq theatre commander whom the Senate unanimously confirmed to that post back in January, became too much for the Enemy Media to continue denying. That shame-enforced candor started spreading even to hardcore Donk war opponents. After which I prediced, and was soon vindicated, that the Dems would simply cut their propaganda losses on the military side and switch their case for cutting & running to the unworthiness of the elected Iraqi government.

The first inkling over the weekend that a breakthrough was in the offing on the political side of the Iraq equation was Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki publicly telling Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton to, you should pardon the expression, go be intimate with a camel:

Iraq's beleaguered prime minister on Sunday lashed out at American critics who have called for his ouster, saying Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Carl Levin need to "come to their senses."

Nouri al-Maliki, who is fighting to hold his government together, issued a series of stinging ripostes against a variety of foreign officials who recently have spoken negatively about his leadership. But those directed at Democrats Clinton, of New York, and Levin, of Michigan, were the most strident.

"There are American officials who consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages, for example Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin. They should come to their senses," al-Maliki said at a news conference. ....

The Shiite prime minister said a negative report by Petraeus would not cause him to change course, although he said he expected that the U.S. general would "be supportive of the government and will disappoint the politicians who are relying on it" to be negative.

It shouldn't amaze me, but it still does that Democrats can be such obsequious, enthusiastic boot-lickers to every enemy, thug, tinpot, and dictator on the face of the planet, yet be so imperious, condescending, and contemptuous to democratically-elected allies. Can it really not have ever occurred to the Quaker Oatman's evil twin and Her Infernal Majesty that Maliki does not answer to them but to the Iraqi people? Or that if the Iraqi people want Maliki out, they've got all the legal "machinery" in place to do so? Or that the Iraqi people themselves don't answer to American Democrats either? Well did the Admiral call this "the worst kind of colonialist claptrap," and well did Mr. Maliki blast it back in Levin's and Hillary's sneering faces.

But, of course, we know the source of this addle-minded cognitive dissonance: coddling enemy dictators feeds Donk "peace-maker" egotism, and pissing in the face of the only Iraqi leader who can deliver political goods to match what General Petraeus is getting done against al Qaeda and Iranian proxy militias serves their domestic political ends. Dems can't deny that the "Surge" is working, so they have to make sure Maliki fails, and Iraqi democracy along with it.

But Maliki isn't failing. Not only has he made common cause with the Kurds and freshly US-aligned Sunni tribes against al Qaeda, but yesterday he announced the long-awaited political agreement that people like Levin and Mrs. Clinton declared impossible:

Iraq's top Shi'ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political leaders announced on Sunday they had reached consensus on some key measures seen as vital to fostering national reconciliation.

The agreement by the five leaders was one of the most significant political developments in Iraq for months and was quickly welcomed by the United States, which hopes such moves will ease sectarian violence that has killed tens of thousands. ...

Maliki's appearance on Iraqi television with the four other leaders at a brief news conference was a rare show of public unity.

The other officials present were President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi; Shi'ite Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, and Masoud Barzani, president of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.

Iraqi officials said the five leaders had agreed on draft legislation that would ease curbs on former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party joining the civil service and military.

Consensus was also reached on a law governing provincial powers as well as setting up a mechanism to release some detainees held without charge, a key demand of Sunni Arabs since the majority being held are Sunnis.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Iraq was supposed to be ungovernable. No way that Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites could ever agree on anything, much less live together in the same country without killing each other. Civil war was inevitable. Nothing we could do to stop it. That's why we had to get out as soon as possible.

In the unforgettable words of Zell Miller at the 2004 GOP convention, "They were wrong." And so the libs really have nothing left to say. The "Surge" has crushed al Qaeda in Iraq, and the "irreconcilable" Iraqi factions have come together as a result under the leadership of the man Dems insisted needed to be sacked. The latter's nightmare 2008 scenario of victory in Iraq, and perhaps even some troops starting to come home in hard-fought (in more ways than one) triumph just in time for the general election campaign home stretch, a scenario that seemed such a pipedream to those of us on the Right since last November's midterm debacle, now looms larger than ever as a real possibility.

So how has the lib press reported this breakthrough? That's hard to say, seeing as how they've hardly reported it at all:

Let's say we're at war, and we're waiting for some specific action to take place to show us that our efforts are succeeding. Add in that the war itself would be rather controversial and that our political class is split as to whether we will ever see that specific action take place. Imagine that Congress and the White House have scheduled a showdown in the next couple of weeks to determine how much longer we will wait for that development.

Now imagine that the specific action for which we've waited actually occurs. Where would you think that story appear in Washington's biggest newspaper? The front page, one might assume. Would you believe ... page 9?....

At least the Washington Post reported the story. Over at the Los Angeles Times, where they claim that "From Baghdad to Buenos Aires, the Times' thirty foreign correspondents cover news from around the world," they don't even bother to report the story at all, despite having a later "bed" time than the Post. In fact, they didn't even bother to reprint the AP or Reuters dispatch on it.

Over at the New York Times, meanwhile, another strange silence appears on this story. Again, like their West Coast namesake, the NYT doesn't even bother to run the story from its wire services. On their Iraq page, which lists all of their stories on the topic, they list no new stories for today, and only a background story on Congressional visits and an op-ed by Fred Kaplan about the loss of faith in senior leadership by junior officers from yesterday.

What happened to "all the news that's fit to print"? Perhaps we're seeing "all the news that prints to fit" - the predetermined narrative.

The vindication of George W. Bush in Iraq is not the endgame the American Left wants, so its house media organs simply will not report it. In the classic totalitarian tradition, they evidently believe that any event they ignore "officially" never happened, and if they black it out, the American people will never know about it.

That can't last, of course. Maybe it could have in the Vietnam "glory" days when the three broadcast networks and major metropolitan newspapers were all there was, but not in the sprawling media market of today, in which the Enemy Media is still dominant, but far from the monopoly it once was, and no longer possessing the power to summarily "disappear" stories that don't fit their political agenda. Just as the success of the "Surge" reached the threshold of undeniability, so the political reconciliation of Iraqi factions will get disseminated, and just in time for the September showdown over General Petraeus' long-anticipated interim report to Congress.

It's all slip-sliding away from the Dems. Everything they think got them elected last November and everything they think will get them the White House back November next, going up in smoke.

They better start dialing up their idols, or demons, or holy heads of lettuce, or power crystals, or cosmic muffins, or whatever the heck else those people worship and beg these faux "deities" to empower al Qaeda to set off a dirty bomb in the middle of the Baghdad Green Zone or something similarly spectacular. Because as it stands now, the cherished plug-pulling ambition of the anti-war crowd is being effectively {ahem} pre-empted.