Through A Mirror, Darkly

How is it possible for two groups of people to look at the same set of facts and draw such diametrically opposite conclusions?

Answer: it isn't.  Which means one group of people is NOT looking at the facts.

Case in point:

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the launch of the Iraq war, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are competing over who is best suited to lose it. Obama touts his judgment in opposing the war from the beginning. Clinton brags that she has “the knowledge and confidence to bring our troops home.” In speeches marking the fifth year of the war, both demonstrated just how determinedly out of touch the Democrats have become with Iraq war as it is, as opposed to how they wish it were.

Both promise to withdraw one or two U.S. combat brigades a month, with Obama specifying that at that pace “we can remove all of them in sixteen months.” He stipulates that this will not be “a precipitous drawdown.” One trembles to think how he would define such a drawdown, since he is proposing removing the troops as quickly as believes would be logistically possible....

Clinton says President Bush and John McCain “want to keep us tied to another country’s civil war, a war we cannot win.”...She says by the summer “we’ll be right back at square one with 130,000 or more troops on the ground in Iraq.”...

Obama resorts to the Democrats’ favorite fairy tale in promising that, after we leave, we will have “a counter-terrorism force to strike al Qaeda if it forms a base that the Iraqis cannot destroy.” He seems to have visions of al-Qaeda bulldozing a runway and stringing up barbed wire around an easily identifiable base....

Clinton says she’ll seek “to secure stability within Iraq as we bring our troops home, stability that will be key to a successful withdrawal for our troops”...[by] press[ing] the Iraqis to reconcile....

“Rather than fight a war that does not need to be fought, we need to start fighting the battles that need to be won on the central front in the war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Obama says. He thus defines away the need to fight al-Qaeda in a strategically crucial country in the Arab heartland....

Obama argues essentially that nothing bad would be happening in the world without the Iraq war. North Korea wouldn’t be pursuing nuclear weapons, even though it has been doing so for decades; the Taliban wouldn’t be a determined enemy in Afghanistan, even though it was always clear we’d have a long counterinsurgency fight there; al-Qaeda wouldn’t be in the Pakistani tribal areas, even though those areas have always been ungoverned and the Pakistani government has undertaken operations there in fits and starts unconnected to the Iraq war.

This from "the reality-based community".

Now let's hear from somebody who actually knows what he's talking about:

“The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around - it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror. For the terrorists, Iraq was supposed to be the place where al Qaeda rallied Arab masses to drive America out. Instead, Iraq has become the place where Arabs joined with Americans to drive al Qaeda out. In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology, and his murderous network. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated. The terrorist movement feeds on a sense of inevitability, and claims to rise on the tide of history. The accomplishments of the surge in Iraq are exposing this myth and discrediting the extremists. When Iraqi and American forces finish the job, the effects will reverberate far beyond Iraq's borders. Osama bin Laden once said: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." By defeating al Qaeda in Iraq, we will show the world that al Qaeda is the weak horse."

The word of the President of the United States not good enough for you?  How about a candid concession from Iran's principle Iraqi kingpin:

“I have failed to liberate Iraq, and transform its society into an Islamic society.”
– Moqtada al-Sadr, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, March 8, 2008

Moqtada al-Sadr — the radical cleric dubbed “The Most Dangerous Man in Iraq” by a Newsweek cover story in December 2006 — has just unilaterally extended the ceasefire he imposed on his Mahdi Army militia last summer. And on the eve of the Iraq War’s fifth anniversary, Sadr also issued a somber but dramatic statement. He not only declared that he had failed to transform Iraq, but also lamented the new debates and divisions within his own movement. Explaining his marginalization, Sadr all but confessed his growing isolation: “One hand cannot clap alone.”

So you see, it isn't just al Qaeda we've crushed in Iraq, but also Iranian subversion and the mullahgarchy's goal of eventually conquering Iraq and extending their sphere of influence (and theocratic terror) throughout the Middle East.  Blocking that enemy ambition helps lessen the likelihood of a wider war in that global tinder box.  We have been and are, literally, fighting for peace.  Or, to borrow yet another old saying, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".

We're still not doing enough to prevent that wider war.  But mindlessly, heedlessly, blindly, and dishonorably quitting Iraq (and Afghanistan) will guarantee it, on the enemy's terms, and in a fashion that we can only win at a cost so terrible as to be unimaginable.  It is that hope, embodied in the eventual 2008 Democrat ticket, that is keeping al Qaeda and Iran in the "game".  They know that if they can just hold on for another ten months, the pressure on them will evaporate, Iraq (and Afghanistan) will be surrendered to them, and the Rodham/Obama administration will present America for blooding, gutting, and butchering at bin Laden's and Ahmadinejad's leisure.

THAT will be the reality if American voters don't wake themselves up from the dark fantasies in which they are now indulging.

Or, rather, given the identity of the Republican nominee, we'll perish quicker....