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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (238395)	7/31/2007 2:24:53 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

What specific "progress" in Iraq over the last several years can you identify as having been a "bad thing" for the "dems?" And how, specifically, was that alleged "progress" harmful to the democrats? Sure. The Anbar Awakening is progress in Iraq. A year ago Anbar was the center of fighting; American troops fought yard by yard in Ramadi and Fallujah. Now the tribes have joined the Americans against al Qaeda. Anbar is quiet. There is no fighting in Ramadi and Fallujah. The MSM has mostly reacted by not reporting about Anbar anymore. That's the Iraq part. Now the Washington part: The Anbar Awakening is very harmful to politicians like Sen. Reid and Reps. Pelosi and Murtha who have already proclaimed that the "surge has failed" and troops should be withdrawn pronto. That is their main issue, the one they have staked out. That is red meat to their base. The Anbar awakening is a concrete sign that it was at the least premature to declare that the surge had failed. Polls begin to show a reversal of the long decline in support for the war (like the recent NYT poll that the Times found so "counterintuitive). If support for the war should creep back up to anything much over 40% or even 50%, then Sen. Reid and Reps Pelosi and Murtha have a political problem on their hands. In this case, they now have to choose between pleasing their base and pleasing the more conservative Dems and Independents. That's bad news for them; their base is at most 25% of voters. They are in roughly the same position as the Democrats were in in 1864. They were poised to win on a platform of negotiating an end to the bloody quagmire of the Civil War (1000s of time bloodier than this conflict). Then Sherman took Atlanta, and Lincoln got reelected. How pleasing was Sherman's victory to the Democrats? *And if it's democratic "just politics" then how do you explain the growing groundswell of public REPUBLICAN disgust and despair with respect to the entire Iraq "adventure?" Oh, that's simple. Loss of nerve is not a phenomenon limited to one side of the aisle, and those Republicans were reading the same polls. You can safely predict the future reactions of those Republicans as more polls come out.