Amongst the left’s varied anti-Bush narratives, one of them is that President Bush is a rather dense man who stubbornly sticks to a policy even after it has been proved a failure. This was used to great effect in the 2006 campaign when the Democratic narrative about Iraq being unwinnable seemed confirmed by events in Iraq. But, as it turns out, President Bush could change – and take on the policy of his staunchest GOP critic, John McCain – and so the “troop surge” was begun, and it has now proven to be one of the most amazing military and political successes in the annals of American arms. Meanwhile, Barack Obama not only refuses to admit to the changed reality, he seems determined to carry off his 2008 campaign as if the situation of 2006 still exists, as Michael Barone notes:
In January 2007, when George W. Bush ordered the surge strategy, which John McCain had advocated since the summer of 2003, Barack Obama informed us that the surge couldn’t work. The only thing to do was to get out as soon as possible.
That stance proved to be a good move toward winning the presidential nomination — but it was poor prophecy. It is beyond doubt now that the surge has been hugely successful, beyond even the hopes of its strongest advocates, like Frederick and Kimberly Kagan. Violence is down enormously, Anbar and Basra and Sadr City have been pacified, Prime Minister Maliki has led successful attempts to pacify Shiites as well as Sunnis, and the Iraqi parliament has passed almost all of the “benchmark” legislation demanded by the Democratic Congress — all of which Barack Obama seems to have barely noticed or noticed not at all. He has not visited Iraq since January 2006 and did not seek a meeting with Gen. David Petraeus when he was in Washington.
I can remember how opponents of the Vietnam War simply tuned out news of American success when at Richard Nixon’s orders Gen. Creighton Abrams pursued a new strategy. Opponents of the Iraq war, including Obama, seem to have been doing the same.
We’ve seen that here on Blogs for Victory, on a necessarily smaller scale – still our leftist readers insist that its all a failure and we must get out and they still search for any iota of negativity to use as justification for their dissent against victory in Iraq. In the American political family, Barack Obama and his Democrats have become the dissenting juror who has never seen 11 such stubborn men in his life – everyone is catching on to our stupendous victory, except for them. My guess is that Obama and his Democrats just don’t know what to do with victory in Iraq, so they simply pretend it isn’t happening.
The fundamental problem here is that the American left is not animated by love of country – they are animated by a desire for power and a desire for affirmation that they are, indeed, the smartest, wisest and most caring people around. Had the left been animated by love of country they, first off, wouldn’t have gone in for all that conspiracy-theory nonsense mostly saying “Bush lied, people died” – but even if they did at one time feel justified in saying that, anyone who loves America would now admit to our victory and, if once opposed to the effort – especially the troop surge – they would admit they were wrong about it and join in congratulating our military, the President and those (like John McCain) who advoated the surge even when it was unpopular to do so. We can expect precisely nothing like this from the left – because to admit they were wrong would mean they aren’t the smartest people in the room and if there’s one thing they’ll never do, it is to admit that.
As for how this will play out in the 2008 campaign – who knows? Obama will continue to talk of a failed 8 years and how McCain just promises more failure. We will see if this ends up making Obama look like a fool – or, to be more accurate, more of a fool than he already appears. McCain, meanwhile, will be able to continually point to his advocacy of the surge – and its complete success – as proof of his abilitiy to analyse a difficult situation and come up with the correct solution…which is just what we need, all else being equal, in a President.
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