The Few, The Cowardly....

...."some in Washington":

It isn't so much that Harry Reid, Barack Obama, Chuck Hagel, et al were wrong about the "Surge"; it doesn't take a military genius to add the two-plus-two of additional troops + counterinsurgency strategy = victory.  We'd been trying to stabilize Iraq on the cheap for three years, and getting the results such vaccilation merited.

The point is, war opponents didn't want to do what was necessary to win.  The Democrats not just because they're traitors, but because they believed that defeat could be blamed on the Bush Administration and they would clean up politically as a result; RINOs like Hagel because they feared the political consequences of escalating the American presence in Iraq in the teeth of the midterm election defeat the GOP had just absorbed.  It wasn't the means that were lacking, but the will.

Thankfully, President Bush still had some willfullness fumes left in his long-since empty tank, and they carried the "Surge" through to success, as Ensign Ed helpfully illustrates.

The afformentioned Senator Hussein has taken a beating in recent weeks over his willfully blind war opposition and his belated attempts to extricate himself from it.  Next week he embarks on Lucifer World Tour 2008 which will culminate in his first visit to Iraq since the beginning of his senate term.  It is meant to reshape the mordant, cowardly narrative hung around his neck by Team Maverick and by his own PR bumbling, and is symbolized by the totalitarianist "disappearing" from his campaign website of all his discouraging, not to mention insulting, words against the "Surge".

Yet the guy just cannot get out of his own way.  In Sunday's New York Fishwrap he tried to reconcile the irreconcilable, and ended up moving laterally from honest defeatist to filthy, stinking lying defeatist:

In the eighteen months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.

That's his sop to the Surge, while conveniently neglecting to mention that he opposed it from day one.  But he has to make that concession because to continue to deny it makes him look like a bigger and bigger fool - and besides, it provides him with a fresh justification for his precious pel-mel retreat:

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country.

"Redeploying" as in "withdrawing."  As though the goverment of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hasn't made precisely the dramatic political progress in unifying and extending sovereign control over Iraqi territory that BO continues to insist we have to blackmail him into.  Progress that never would have been made if St. Barry had gotten his way.

The thing is, while the Iraqi army and security forces have, indeed, made dramatic progress, there's still a catch:

Obama notes that General James Dubik says that the army and police will be ready to stand on their own by 2009, but he forgets to mention that the same assessment shows their air force and navy to be years away from viability.

A precipitous withdrawal, including of that close air support, would unravel the progress the Iraqi army has made, to say nothing of leaving Iraq naked to Iranian attack.  It would be as though....the "Surge" never took place.

And though he denies it, the retreat timetable he still hasn't changed - sixteen months - would indeed be precipitous:

90% - NINETY PERCENT - of ALL our military equipment in-theater - the humvees, the Bradley fighting vehicles, the Abrams battle tanks, the combat helicopters, pretty much everything except our combat aircraft that would have to be shipped overland to Kuwait and loaded on sea-borne transports - would have to be left behind in Obama's Dunkirkesque bugout.  And after Iran and al Qaeda came back in and took over, well, either the former would have their own ready-made army, or the latter's conventional forces would be gifted a dramatic qualitative and quantitative upgrade.

Of course, this self-inflicted disgrace would differ from the British evacuation from Dunkirk in June 1940 in one crucial sense: that bugout snatched eventual victory in that war from the jaws of certain defeat.  This one would be the diametric opposite.  A fact that even some Obama allies did not hestitate to loudly point out.

For instance, Michael O’Hanlon:

Michael E. O’Hanlon, a Democratic defense analyst at the Brookings Institution who has been an outspoken supporter of the war in Iraq, said he could not believe that Obama would put such a definitive timeline into print before a trip to Iraq, where he is to consult with Iraqi leaders and U.S. commanders.

“To say you’re going to get out on a certain schedule — regardless of what the Iraqis do, regardless of what our enemies do, regardless of what is happening on the ground — is the height of absurdity,” said O’Hanlon, who described himself as “livid.” “I’m not going to go to the next level of invective and say he shouldn’t be president. I’ll leave that to someone else.”

And the Washington Post:

Barack Obama [Mon]day accused President Bush and Senator John McCain of rigidity on Iraq: “They said we couldn’t leave when violence was up, they say we can’t leave when violence is down.” Mr. Obama then confirmed his own foolish consistency. Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan. After hinting earlier this month that he might “refine” his Iraq strategy after visiting the country and listening to commanders, Mr. Obama appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq.

Mr. Obama’s charge against the Republicans was not entirely fair, since Mr. Bush has overseen the withdrawal of five American brigades from Iraq this year, and Mr. McCain has suggested that he would bring most of the rest of the troops home by early 2013. Mr. Obama’s timeline would end in the summer of 2010, a year or two before the earliest dates proposed recently by members of the Iraqi government. The real difference between the various plans is not the dates but the conditions: Both the Iraqis and Mr. McCain say the withdrawal would be linked to the ability of Iraqi forces to take over from U.S. troops, as they have begun to do. Mr. Obama’s strategy allows no such linkage — his logic is that a timetable unilaterally dictated from Washington is necessary to force Iraqis to take responsibility for the country.

At the time he first proposed his timetable, Mr. Obama argued — wrongly, as it turned out — that U.S. troops could not stop a sectarian civil war. He conceded that a withdrawal might be accompanied by a “spike” in violence. Now, he describes as “an achievable goal” that “we leave Iraq to a government that is taking responsibility for its future — a government that prevents sectarian conflict and ensures that the al-Qaeda threat which has been beaten back by our troops does not reemerge.” How will that “true success” be achieved? By the same pullout that Mr. Obama proposed when chaos in Iraq appeared to him inevitable.

But it fell to False Messiah's [general election] opponent to wryly distill his cart-before-the-horse-ism to its incoherent essence:

And I note that he is speaking today about his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan before he has even left, before he has talked to General Petraeus, before he has seen the progress in Iraq, and before he has set foot in Afghanistan for the first time. In my experience, fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: first you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy. [emphasis added]

But that doesn't work for Obama's purpose, because Obama's purpose isn't to preserve victory in Iraq, but to preserve his shaky hold on the Democrat presidential nomination, which four months of flip-flopping on everything from FISA reform to public campaign financing has put into more jeopardy than anybody realizes.

He is, as I say, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable: if he shafts the Left on cutting and running from the Middle East, he risks losing the nomination; if he doesn't shaft the Left on cutting and running from the Middle East for the remaining duration of the campaign, he risks losing in November.  Evidently he sees the latter as being less likely than the former, and so he has made it inequivocal that he is going to "Mesopotamia" with his mind already made up before he ever sits down with General Petraeus and his command.  Which renders the centerpiece of his overseas "coming out" party pre-emptively pointless.

So what is Barack Hussein Obama's Iraq policy?  Suffice it to say that it takes this McCain campaign video....

....seven minutes and forty-nine seconds to say "bullbleep".

The coin of the realm for "some in Washington."