Captain Ed has a nice post about the shift in strategies regarding the war in Iraq.
Back at the beginning of the 110th Congress, the far left was salivating at the idea of an immediate pullout in Iraq. There was the "slow bleed" plan. There was a call for timetables. But the nutroots have grumbled for months about the ineffectiveness of the Democrats to end this war now!
It does little good to point out to the nuttier aspects of the Left that Democrats won Congress for a handful of reasons, and opposition to the war was but part of that (other reasons included Republican dissatisfaction with out-of-control spending, immigration "reform," and President Bush's inability to veto anything, not to mention the Mark Foley fallout). For some reason, the far left insists that every person who voted against the Republicans wanted immediate withdrawal. But as Rush Limbaugh said at the beginning of the surge, Americans don't want to lose. They want to win. That's why poll results are always so mixed. Yes, Americans want out of Iraq but no, they don't want to lose to do it.
As Captain Ed points out, the success of the surge is now having an effect on the Democratic candidates' war policies. Now the Democrats won't commit to troop withdrawal by 2013.
The leading Democratic White House hopefuls conceded Wednesday night they cannot guarantee to pull all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of the next presidential term in 2013.
"I think it's hard to project four years from now," said Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois in the opening moments of a campaign debate in the nation's first primary state.
"It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting," added Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
"I cannot make that commitment," said former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.
Hillary Clinton has taken a lot of heat from the left for her votes authorizing the Iraq war and her statements that she cannot guarantee immediate troop pullouts upon election. But as much as it pains me to admit it, she's been right on both counts. Promising immediate troop withdrawals has been just so much pandering to the left. Now, with General Petraeus reporting actual success in Iraq, Americans are more hopeful that we can win and more reluctant to leave.
It's difficult for Democrats to support an ever-shrinking portion of American opinion in the face of actual successes in Iraq. President Bush said originally that this would be a hard, long war. People (including the Democrats) were foolish to ignore those statements. And while Americans may want their loved ones home, they want to win this war more.
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