White House depiction of Iraq
Yippee! There's been a downturn in the violence in Iraq. The surge has been a huge success and Iraq is now a nation of group hugs, cotton candy, and rainbows.
At least, that's the impression you get from the White House and a media who's past mistakes should make them one helluva lot more cautious. In an interview with President Bush, ABC's Charlie Gibson asked, "You took a lot of doubting and rather skeptical questions about the surge. I'll give you a chance to crow. Do you want to say, I told you so?" Bush said he didn't. George W. Bush is now more circumspect about the Iraq war than the media.
And he's certainly more cautious than the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby:
With the media at last paying attention to the progress in Iraq, shouldn't leading Democrats think about doing the same? Perhaps this would be a good time for Hillary Clinton to express regret for telling Petraeus that his recent progress report on Iraq required "a willing suspension of disbelief" - in effect, calling him a liar. Perhaps Senate majority leader Harry Reid should admit that he may have been wrong to declare so emphatically: "This war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything."
All of the Democratic presidential candidates have been running on a platform of abandoning Iraq. At the recent debate in Las Vegas, they refused to relax their embrace of defeat even when asked about the striking evidence of improvement. They continued to insist that "the surge is not working" (Bill Richardson), that "the occupation is fueling the insurgency" (Dennis Kucinich), and that the "strategy is failed" and we must "get our troops out" (Barack Obama).
Jacoby ends his piece by asking how dems can "be so invested in defeat that they would abandon even a war that may be winnable?" and by saying that, with things in Iraq "looking so hopeful, this is no time to cling to a counsel of despair."
It's a little ironic that Jacoby meant to misuse the word "hopeful," but failed. The word he was looking for was something that meant "improved" -- the word he used means "optimistic." An optimist and a realist are often two different things and Jacoby's playing the optimist here...
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