The Redhunter

Note how the CNN anchor seems amazed that Durbin would admit to any military progress at all. It's as if he couldn't quite believe his ears at first.

What's going on here is that the Democrats have learned that the "surge" (more properly Operation Phantom Thunder) is working better than they expected, or as I should say, feared. And I'm not going to go through the evidence here, but all signs point to military success in Iraq, at least right now.

Rep James Clyburn accidentally spoke the truth when he said that it would be a “real big problem for us” if Petraeus’s progress report is good.

Petraeus is not someone they can mock or disparage and get away with it. They know that if they take this tack they'll look stupid and will lose half their party. The nutroots may want to hear that Petraeus is Bush's lapdog, but it won't play with Joe and Jane Average.

What they'll do then is say we should pull out of Iraq because the Iraqis can't get their act together at the federal level.

To a certain extent the Democrats will have a point. Ultimately the Iraqis do have to make political progress. But it's not quite that simple. As the editors of National Review pointed out last week

Ultimately, reconciliation between the Sunnis and the Shiites is crucial. But it wasn’t going to happen in the next two months, whether the Iraqi parliament stayed in session or not. General Petraeus’s September report has come to be seen as a final test for Iraq, which makes sense only for Democrats hell-bent on leaving no matter what, and for nervous Republicans seeking a soft exit. We are beginning to see the fruits of a sound counterinsurgency strategy and, in this context, a debate focused on how to get out rather than how to consolidate our gains is shameful, however easy the sound bites are.

My thought is that we've had Iraq backward all along. We've put political progress ahead of military progress, and we should have done it the other way 'round. We hurried to set up one provisional government after another, draft a constitution, hold elections, etc. Our hope was that by doing these things we could take the "legitimacy" out of the insurgency.

It didn't work.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but we should have done this "surge" back in 2004 or at least 2005, and only when we'd squashed the terrorists worried about the political side.

The reason we got it wrong, I think, is that we have a tendancy to "mirror image" our thinking. We assume that hey, we can all get along without shooting each other, why can't they? We forget that the reality is that there are a lot of extremists over there who will shoot if they can't get their way politically. And before going in we completely underestimated extremism in Iraq. These people figure they can get what they want through violence, so they don't put much stock in what we consider normal political negotiations. Rather, they'll hold out for a better deal through violence.

Extremists will only negotiate in good faith when all violent options have closed; i.e., when the US military has crushed the insurgency.

All this is also why peace between Israel and Hamas or Fatah is a pipe dream. Or Israel and Lebanon. Until these terrorist organizations are destroyed or physically isolated there will never be peace.

David at The Thunder Run made another point to me in an email (which I won't print since it's private) that Iraqis are in fact making progress on the local level, and that this is in reality how most things get done in the US as well. He sees the war being won on the local level, both against al Qaeda and in the US military (primary leutenant colonels) working with local Iraqi leaders. As always he makes a good point and I tend to agree.

The bottom line is that the NRO editors have it right; Petraeus' Sept report is not a "final" report but an interim one, yes the Iraqis do eventually have to come together, but we ought to be talking about how to consolidate and expand on our victories, not how to cut-and-run.