California Conservative

God bless Rep. Steve Israel for giving us today’s Washington Quote of the Day. In an article about the Democrats’ meeting unveiling their new plan on Iraq, Rep. Israel is quoted as saying:

“It’s much easier to express an opinion to a pollster than it is to formulate effective policy on something as intractable as Iraq,” Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) said.

Actually, Rep. Israel, it isn’t that difficult if the goal is to defeat the jihadists and stabilize the Iraqi government. The thing that makes this a difficult venture for Democrats is that they’ve gotten away with simply being opposed to anything that President Bush said. Now they’re having to actually use their brains to govern, something that’s obviously foreign to them.

The good news for the Maliki government is that the Democrats are so divided on this that they won’t cut off funding for fear of an electoral defeat in 2008. They love the Loony Left’s campaign contributions and their energy but they also know that following their lead will lead to electoral defeat.

This decision would get easier if they read the headlines from Baghdad:

The government information campaign and the news about thousands of additional troops coming had a positive impact even before the operation started. Commanders and lieutenants of various militant groups abandoned their positions in Baghdad and in some cases fled the country. Diyala province, to the east of Baghdad, was the destination for many Sunni extremists, while Shiite militiamen went to Babil and Diwaniya in the south. Some higher-ranking members of Shiite and Sunni militant groups fled to Iran and Syria respectively. This migration motivated the government to announce supporting security measures in five provinces around Baghdad, to make sure that fleeing bad guys do not regroup in other cities.

Here’s more reason for optimism for Operation Imposing Law:

The Iraqi commanders are also trying to give the operation a national stamp by including troops from across the country–even from Kurdistan and far provinces like Basra, where politicians and officers have been long opposed to being involved in Baghdad. Yet another aspect that makes “Imposing Law” unique is its ascending intensity. Unlike other operations that always started from a peak and soon lost momentum, this plan is becoming stricter and gaining momentum by the day as more troops pour into the city, allowing for a better implementation of the “clear and hold” strategy. People here always want the “hold” part to materialize, and feel safe when they go out and find the Army and police maintaining their posts–the bad guys can’t intimidate as long as the troops are staying.

Here’s what Fred Barnes said on last night’s roundtable about Operation Imposing Law:

BARNES: Bob Gates. It is what Brian Williams said, of NBC. You know, there’re not a lot of reporters who have been over there and then gone back and gone to the same places and looked around, and Brian Williams said two things. One, it is better. Things are better in Baghdad. The surge appears to be off to a good start. Mad Secondly, he said that something that Democrats refused to admit and that is that it is a new strategy. It’s different, what the troops are doing.

HUME: Yeah, it isn’t just an addition of troops, it’s more than the injection of troops.

BARNES: Yeah, that there’s a new strategy. And of course, Nancy Pelosi and all the Democrats pretend like, well, this is just more of the same. Well, there are more troops, but it is not the same strategy. And that, of course, is the reason why it`s beginning to work.

Look, Brian Williams has no reason to say this if is not true. Bob Gates does have a reason to say that things are getting better, he works for the Bush administration, they want to say that. But, Brian Williams is no tool of the Bush administration.

That’s spot-on analysis from Fred Barnes, something that I’ve come to expect from him. What Fred’s essentially saying is that facts on the ground are changing, something that I talked about yesterday.

If Democrats were smart, they’d get out of the way of this new strategy and let it work. That said, Democrats aren’t smart. They won’t get out of the way and give war a chance. That’s why they’ll get hurt in the next election.

“There’s a fine line that I hope will not be blurred between micromanaging the war and assuring accountability,” said Rep. Stephanie Herseth (SD), a Blue Dog leader. “I don’t think we should be overreacting to public opinion polls.”
But antiwar liberals find such temporizing infuriating, seeing the Democratic win in November’s midterm elections as a clear mandate to end the war.

For some reason, the old song “Torn Between Two Lovers” comes to mind. I think that Rep. Herseth would like to vote to defund the war but realizes that she’d get creamed if she stopped triangulating.

Technorati Tags: Steve Israel, Nancy Pelosi, Anti-war Activists, Defeatocrats, Iraq War, Triangulation, Polling, Operation Imposing Law

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 8:05 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Election 2008, Iraq, Military, Pelosi, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.