Just a few short weeks ago Democrats were quite adamant that a surge of troops into Baghdad was a god-awful and foolish idea. Who seemed to be saying that it was sheer stupidity to imagine that anything the US could do would change the hopeless quagmire that is Iraq.
Fooled again.
This week, antiwar protesters are sitting in the offices of Democrats who they say aren't working quickly enough or enthusiastically enough to suit them.
The antiwar protesters are worried, you see. What will happen to them and their cause, if the unthinkable happens? That is, if things start to improve in Iraq. Imagine how discouraged they must already be to have discovered just the other day that Iraqis are "optimistic"; and that they don't believe their country is in the middle of a "civil war".
It sounds to me like the leftist template for this war is in danger of being cracked wide open. The most recent antics of the antiwar clownscan hardly be taken seriously by any adult. They only expose themselves as immature, silly, and grossly out of touch with reality. Scroll down through the pictures at the link above to get a full flavor of how the left "supports the troops". They appear to pride themselves on their cleverness and irreverent use of profanity and vulgarity--as if somehow this makes them real grownup people and not simply a bunch of narcissistically self-absorbed adolescents.
Rich Lowry has this to say:
When President Bush announced a surge of troops into Baghdad in January, Democrats pounded him for the folly of putting U.S. troops in the “middle of a civil war.” Two months later, the question is, What happens to a civil war if only one side shows up to fight it?
The Shia militias that had become the main driver of violence in Baghdad are ducking and covering. Mlitia leader Moqtada al-Sadr is in hiding, perhaps in Iran. His fighters aren’t resisting U.S. troops who have begun conducting patrols in his stronghold of Sadr City. According to Gen. Dave Petraeus, 700 members of Sadr’s Mahdi Army have been detained in recent months.
This hardly means that peace and harmony reign in Baghdad, but it has reduced the killing significantly. If at the beginning of the year anyone had predicted such progress from the addition of just two U.S. combat brigades in Bagdad (six brigades eventually will be part of the surge), he would have been derided as a delusional optimist.
This progress might be transitory, but it illustrates the falsity of a key assumption of Democrats. They prefer to talk of Iraq in terms of a civil war because it suggests that nothing can be done about the violence, that it is running its own hermetic course. Well, it clearly isn’t. What the U.S. does matters. If we hadn’t surged, Baghdad already might have descended into the genocidal fury toward which it was headed earlier in the year.
....According to a U.S. intelligence report quoted by the New York Times, captured materials from al Qaeda in Iraq say that the group sees “the sectarian war for Baghdad as the necessary main focus of its operations.” So the Democrats profess to want to fight terrorists in Iraq, and al Qaeda in Iraq is making Baghdad its focus. It would stand to reason, then, that the Democrats wouldn’t want to undermine our effort to control Baghdad. Our counterinsurgency mission there is a counterterrorism mission. It aims to squeeze out terrorists, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Nonetheless, Democrats in the House and Senate are attempting to force our troops from Baghdad, exactly as al Qaeda in Iraq wants. There is an essential symmetry to the goals of Sunni militants and Democrats here at home with regard to the disposition of our forces — the fewer, the farther away from Baghdad, the better (needless to say, for vastly different reasons).
Lowry goes on to say that each side--the opposition to the war and the supporters of the war--are completely invested in their respective narratives of the war. The left is invested in a narrative of defeat; while Bush and his allies are invested in a narrative of success.
Think about that carefully for a moment.
A significant portion of our population is completely invested in making sure that the US suffers a significant military defeat at the hands of an enemy who find it perfectly acceptable to do things like this; and this.
Oh yeah, how could I forget. The compassionate left and the Democrats are adamantly against this war (and all wars, of course), "for the sake of the children."
Mouthing the usual platitudes; frolicing semi-naked in the streets for the sake of "peace"; or engaging in pious--and meaningless-- posturing during Congressional debates makes all of them feel so darn good about themselves and what great guys and gals they are, though.
It's hard to ask them to give up their narrative of defeat when so much of their precious self-esteem is utterly dependent on it. I wouldn't want to hurt their feelings or anything.
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