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

To: michael97123 who wrote (250872)	12/6/2007 4:46:36 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Michael O'Hanlon offers some good advice, one could almost say, some obvious advice, to the Dems to stop demanding surrender in Iraq and instead claim some credit for success. Don't tell Ed, he's still stuck on the Iraq-is-a-disaster-the-brave-freedom-fighters-will-destroy-the-puppet-goverment Vietnam era model. When he's not claiming that everybody but himself is wrong about everything, that is: Rarely in U.S. history has a political party diagnosed a major failure in the country's approach to a crucial issue of the day, led a national referendum on the failing policy, forced a change in that policy that led to major substantive benefits for the nation — and then categorically refused to take any credit whatsoever for doing so. This is, of course, the story of the Democrats and the Iraq war over the past 13 months. Without a Democratic takeover of the Congress in 2006, there is little chance that President Bush would have acknowledged his Iraq policy to be failing, and that Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker would have been accorded the resources and the policy latitude needed to radically improve the situation on the ground. Democrats were not the authors of the surge and in fact generally opposed it. But without their pressure, it probably never would have happened. We now have a realistic chance, not of victory, but of what my fellow Brookings scholar Ken Pollack and I call sustainable stability. Violence rates have dropped by half to two-thirds in the course of 2007, the lowest level in years. Iraq is still very unstable, but it has a chance. Despite this progress, many Democrats are inclined to provide Bush the roughly $12 billion a month he requests for Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008 only if the money is devoted narrowly to counterterrorism and bringing home U.S. troops. This is a mistake. Going positive On strategic grounds, it appears that we now have an opportunity to salvage something significant in Iraq. Given sectarian tensions and brittle Iraqi institutions, this almost surely requires us to execute a gradual drawdown of U.S. forces there rather than an abrupt departure. In political terms, it would be rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory to mandate an end to an operation, however unpopular, just when it is showing its first signs of progress. Democrats should change course. Rather than demand an end to the operation no matter what, they should continue to keep up the pressure for positive results in Iraq. They can retain their anti-war stance, emphasizing that their default position is that U.S. troops should soon come home absent continued major progress. http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/12/a-new-course-on.html