NANCY PELOSI: This is not working, it’s a war without end, there is no light at the end of the tunnel, we must reverse it.
JOE LIEBERMAN: Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’s new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq.
FRED BARNES: You hear someone like Nancy Pelosi and there’s just an air of unreality about what she says. “There’s no light at the end of the tunnel,” and so on. And if you know what’s going on in Iraq, which has now been reported, that al-Qaeda is being defeated, there’s no al-Qaeda stronghold anywhere in Iraq any more; the civil war is virtually over; the Sunni insurgency doesn’t exist—they’ve thrown in with the U.S. and with the Iraqi government; there’s reconciliation—not at the level of the somewhat dysfunctional Iraqi national government, but there certainly is at the provincial level, all over Iraq. About every day you read a story of a Shia leader going to visit Sunni sheiks—it’s remarkable what’s happened there. It’s gone from losing to winning—not won, but winning—and Democrats pretend like nothing has changed.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Lieberman’s charge is a very strong one . . . he essentially is saying that Democrats are so invested in being vindicated in their hatred of George Bush by seeing his war end badly in defeat, than they are emotionally invested in seeing their own country succeed in this war where our soldiers are dying every day. That’s a pretty serious charge, and you get evidence of that when you see Pelosi introducing a bill which would essentially cripple the surge—which is having success—have an arbitrary date of withdrawal, regardless of how close America is to achieving success, and doing it in a way which is sort of ignoring reality. She’s operating as if this is November ’06, when she wins the House and the war is going badly, and not November ’07, when everything has changed on the ground. There was a report in the New York Times today that al-Qaeda’s been driven out of Baghdad. That’s a big story, completely ignored by Democrats who have only one mantra, which is Defeat and Withdrawal.
—On Hillary and the Surge—
MARA LIASSON: I think there are risks [to this narrative], and that’s why you’re not going to hear Hillary Clinton saying something like that if and when she gets the nomination. . . . She has actually said that she has seen progress in Anbar Province, She has acknowledged that there has been military progress.
BARNES: Then why is she still against the surge?
LIASSON: Because she’s running in a Democratic primary.
BARNES: Okay, then she’s just intellectually dishonest, you’re saying.
KRAUTHAMMER: And that’s news?
LIASSON: She’s performing the balancing act that every potential frontrunner or nominee tries to do.
BARNES: You know what it’s not? It’s not leadership and it’s not presidential.
