He could have added that his former party had reversed Gen. Douglas McArthur's declaration that there is no substitute for victory to read, "There is no substitute for your country's defeat when you want to win elections."

Although targeted from the outset, both Petraeus and Crocker managed manfully to withstand the often nasty implications inherent in the Democrats' questioning. Petraeus even treated Mrs. Clinton as if she were a lady, despite the fact that the last time he came to the Hill to talk about the situation in Iraq she all but called him a liar before his appearance.

Frankly, I don't know how he sat there being so respectful of these people, when they are doing everything in their power to undermine what he's doing. They are also giving hope, not to our troops, but to the enemy which is trying to kill them.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller helped to set the tone for his Democratic colleagues before the hearings when he accused his colleague, war hero Sen. John McCain, of what amounts to a war crime saying, "McCain was a fighter pilot who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."

Sen. Rockefeller was forced to apologize to McCain. He didn't explain how he, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not know that when John McCain was flying missions over North Vietnam there were no such things as laser guided missiles.

If we had listened to the defeatist Democrats there wouldn't be 175,000 trained Iraqi soldiers, 379,000 trained Iraqi police, 90,000 trained Sons of Iraq, and you wouldn't have Maliki, a Shia leader, sending his military into Basra to fight Shia militias.

Instead, al Sadr would be running Iraq with the help of Iran, and bin Laden would be using Iraq as a training base for al Qaeda.