Listening to the Democrats denying our progress in Iraq is reminiscent of a high school debate where one team gets stuck with the wrong side of the issue and has to defend it valiantly anyway. But in real life, especially when life-and-death consequences are involved, such artificial, unreasonable positions are not valiant but disgraceful.
On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson whether his plan to withdraw all troops from Iraq was outdated now that the surge "shows signs of working." Wallace noted that U.S. casualties for October were the lowest since March 2006 and civilian casualties, murders and roadside bomb attacks have all fallen dramatically.
Straight-faced, Richardson replied, "First of all, I don't believe the surge is working. … You don't measure progress by body counts."
Oh? You sure could have fooled Richardson's fellow Democrats who used that yardstick with a vengeance prior to the surge.
But that was before the facts became inconvenient. Since the surge has been working, many Democrats have shifted the goal posts to say we may only measure our progress by political successes.
Political progress was not what Sen. Harry Reid had in mind when he declared the Iraq War lost. It's not what other Democrats were stressing when ceaselessly bludgeoning us with news of daily body counts. That was so yesterday. Richardson, along with other Democrats, now says, "There is no progress in political compromise. The Maliki government has failed to make that happen in dividing up all revenues. Three out of 18 benchmarks by the General Accounting Office have shown that it is a failure."
So if the new struggling government hasn't achieved final legislative compromises on issues that would be exceedingly difficult for an established government, let alone an infant one, our mission in Iraq is a failure? Using that criterion, we must declare the American Revolution and our experiment in constitutional republicanism failures as well since the modern Democratic Party won't even compromise to get behind a war we're currently winning.
It apparently never occurs to these enlightened liberals that in certain situations, the successful use of force is a condition precedent to political compromise -- a principle on full display with Iraqi tribal leaders finally turning on al-Qaeda.
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