Dems afraid of victory??

[Controlled Chaos]

Murtha's got it wrong: We're winning in Iraq

 

December 27, 2005

 

BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN Advertisement

 

Five weeks ago a wave of hysteria swept through Washington. Suddenly the Washington establishment became convinced that the war in Iraq was lost. This conviction was sparked off by the speech of Rep. John Murtha, a crusty former Marine usually described as a conservative Democrat, who declared that U.S. policy in Iraq was "a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion" and called for "immediate redeployment" of U.S. troops.

 

The speech was like a match on a bonfire. Murtha was the lead story in newspapers and on network news programs. He was echoed first by columnists and, after a cautious period of watching the reaction, by his fellow Democrats. News analysts on all sides stressed the vital significance of what Murtha had said.

 

From the extreme left, Alex Cockburn confided that Murtha was merely retailing what four-star Pentagon generals believed to be the grim reality of failure in Iraq. On the right, Rod Dreher of National Review Online warned the GOP that this speech could be "a Cronkite moment" when the U.S. people decisively turned against the Iraq venture like the Tet offensive in Vietnam that Walter Cronkite famously (and, by the way, falsely) proclaimed to be an American defeat.

 

What had happened to provoke this general outburst of pessimism? Nothing on the ground in Iraq suggested a sudden turn to defeat. Indeed, attacks on U.S. troops had been declining. To be sure, murders of "softer targets" such as Iraqi civilians and policemen were continuing -- but they had not increased sharply. The political news was actually favorable: The once-dominant Sunni minority apparently intended to participate in the (then forthcoming) elections. Even Sunni insurgent leaders were turning against the "foreign" al-Qaida terrorists in their midst. And we now know that when Iraq's election was held only days later, there was a larger turnout (70 percent) than is usually the case in the United States itself.

 

Indeed, any dispassionate assessment of Iraq after three years of the liberation-cum-occupation must be far more favorable than not. Compare it to previous guerrilla wars and insurgencies at this point:

 

1. In the Malayan communist "emergency" -- generally regarded as one of the most successful post-war anti-guerrilla campaigns -- the British were losing after three years and had to revamp their entire strategy. (They did so successfully.)

 

2. In Vietnam, the three-year mid-point saw the Viet Cong's Tet offensive -- a U.S. victory obscured by defeatist anti-war reporting that led to a U.S. collapse on the home front and eventually to the destruction of America's Vietnamese allies.

 

3. In Iraq, the United States has midwifed a democratic political system, protected its citizens as they voted in three free elections, handed over sovereign power to an independent Iraqi government, and is now gradually reducing its military assistance to the civil power as Iraqi military and police forces replace Americans in maintaining order.

 

Were there serious mistakes in the last three years? Of course. Serious mistakes are inevitable in such major enterprises as war and revolution. Are there still major problems to be overcome? Naturally, since the establishment of democratic institutions -- difficult in ideal conditions such as the collapse of Soviet power in eastern Europe -- is doubly so in the aftermath of war and revolution.

 

But are we -- the U.S. armed forces and our Iraqi allies -- winning?

 

I put that question to a friend in the Army reserve, just returned from a year in the Sunni Triangle. He is a level-headed and sober observer, a historian by profession, who was working directly with Iraqis in tasks directly related to fighting the insurgency. His reply was unqualified: "Of course we are winning. We know it. The Iraqis know it. And al-Qaida knows it. The only people who apparently don't know it live in Washington."

 

If Iraq did not explain Washington's hysteria, what did? Well, one clue lies in how the speech was reported. Murtha was generally described as being a conservative Democrat and a supporter of the Iraq war. That description was essential to the prominence of the story. An anti-war speech from a pro-war conservative was a far stronger sign that America's support for the war was cracking than another criticism of Bush on Iraq from another partisan Democrat would have been.

 

But Murtha is a partisan Democrat. And just how moderate is he? As Newsweek's Howard Fineman pointed out, Murtha is a close associate of left-liberal Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, whose campaign for the leadership he had managed. As for being pro-war, Murtha had been anti-war for more than two years since calling for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation in September 2003.

 

So the initial reporting distorted and exaggerated the significance of Murtha's intervention, the media's first reactions largely amplified those exaggerations, and Washington's subsequent hysteria suggested to the world, including al-Qaida and the Sunni insurgents, that the United States was about to cut and run in Iraq.

 

This panic attack was eventually sedated by a number of factors -- the success of the Iraqi elections, the Bush administration's fight-back (that included five major speeches from the president), a poll conducted by a (presumably horrified) BBC showing most Iraqis were optimistic about their future, and the reaction of many U.S. troops who rejected Murtha's grim account of their situation. For now a calmer attitude on Iraq prevails.

 

But the Murtha episode was significant nonetheless. The sudden upsurge of support for U.S. withdrawal that he evoked took place at precisely the point that the United States was making important political and military gains. It showed fear certainly -- not fear of defeat, however, but fear of victory.

 

In other words, many Democrats, their media allies, and others in the permanent Washington establishment are defeatist. A defeatist is not just someone who thinks his side will lose. Sometimes a prediction of defeat is realistic. A defeatist is someone who, at some level, expects to lose, even wants to lose, seeing a quagmire in every oasis. His dissent is therefore tainted.

 

We are not supposed, of course, to criticize such dissent. No, we have to call it patriotism.

[YASNY]

Totally awesome article.

[Controlled Chaos]

I thought so too.