There's a Light at the End of This Tunnel Somewhere

The seeds are being planted for the future use of an old and useful myth: "we would have won the war if the politicians back home hadn't surrendered/cut off the funding/tied our hands." A fine example of the effort is found here. You see, the "surge" is working. The trends are positive, and things are looking up. And if those traitorous Dems just had the courage to stay the course and support the Commander in Chief everything would turn out fine.

Of course when even The Economist, hardly a bastion of perfidious liberalism, is quoting people referring to your movement as a "laughing stock" it is going to be difficult to make that stick. It gets better:

But, more important, neocons have been discredited for ideological reasons. Most of the recent mistakes can be traced back not just to flawed execution but to flawed thinking. The neocons argued that democracy might be an antidote to the Middle East's problems: but democracy proved too delicate a plant. They claimed that the assertion of American power might wipe out “Vietnam syndrome”: but it has ended up making America more reluctant to intervene abroad. They talked about linking American power with American ideals: but it turned out, at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, that power can corrupt those ideals.

The dwindling supporters of the war no doubt see that the end is coming sooner rather than later. Bush's basement-dwelling approval ratings, not helped by his rambling, out-of-touch public statements, have torpedoed Karl Rove's ability to shape the terms of the debate. All the increasingly shrill rhetoric coming from the right about "surrender" "treason" and "the troops" (as if they went off half-cocked to Iraq on their own) has not moved the polls showing support for setting a a deadline for withdrawal. The Democrats, shockingly, have shown a little backbone by not backing down in the face of being labelled traitors, which has dealt a further blow to Bush's public standing.

This won't stop the dead-enders from trying to set the stage for some future disaster, though, so we need to strangle this particular baby in its crib. Or to use a more conservative-friendly metaphor, since they are "pro-life", we need to blow this baby up with a cluster bomb from a safe altitude. Bush and company have had four years, at least $500 billion, and essentially complete control of the levers of government to "win" their war on Iraq. Instead, we have Al-Qaeda safe in their hideouts in Pakistan, no doubt reorganizing and planning new atrocities. The Taliban is surging into Afghanistan for a promised spring offensive. Plus Iraq is serving as a weapons-and-tactics training ground for new recruits that will haunt us for a generation as their CIA-trained forbears did from '80s Afghanistan, and no plausible military solution has been put forward.

There's only one logical place to assign the blame for all this, and it ain't on Harry Reid. Even though the Republicans are doing a pretty good job of digging this hole for themselves, we should work harder to make sure that the words "Republican", "incompetence" and "disastrous war" are as inseparable for the next twenty years as "Democrat" and "welfare" were in the 70s and 80s.