They still call for varying forms of what amounts to a politically motivated withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, but there are heartening signs that Democratic lawmakers are regaining their equilibrium. Just a month ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., promised renewed efforts after Congress returns from its August recess to force a hasty withdrawal. Now, other Democrats are injecting some much-needed realism into their party’s debate on the war.
Most notable among these Democrats are Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, who is seeking the presidency. “Clearly, there is momentum there,” Levin said of the surge just before leaving last week for Iraq. On his return this week, he said, “We visited forward operating bases in Mosul and Baghdad. In these areas, as well as a number of others in Iraq, the military aspects of President Bush’s new strategy in Iraq … appear to have produced some credible and positive results.”
He also noted “continuing positive results” from decisions by Sunni leaders in al Anbar province “to turn against al Qaeda and cooperate with coalition force efforts to kill or capture its adherents.” Levin spoke in a joint statement with Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the Armed Services panel’s ranking Republican.
Clinton told a meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that “the surge is working.” She added an observation with which most observers on both sides of the Iraq war debate would likely agree: “We’re just years too late in changing our tactics. We can’t ever let that happen again. We can’t be fighting the last war. We have to keep preparing to fight the new war.”
Levin’s and Clinton’s statements follow those of other Democrats, including most prominently Rep. Brian Baird of Washington, who said that while he voted against the war in 2002, “We’re on the ground now. We have a responsibility to the Iraqi people and a strategic interest in making this work.”
The backstory here is a combination of factors, including the Bush administration’s modestly effective communication of evidence of the surge’s initial success, a landmark New York Times editorial by Democratic scholars Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, hints that public support for successfully finishing the war effort is reviving, and the gnawing fear that Democrats will be held responsible if a bloodbath follows withdrawal. With some Democrats coming back from the brink of surrender on Iraq, there are new grounds for cautious optimism that freedom will eventually be allowed to take root in the benighted country.
