Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Media and Congress are getting it wrong

Mort Kondracke:

The American establishment, led by the media and politicians, is in danger of talking the United States into defeat in Iraq. And the results would be catastrophic.

The media - unperturbed by mistakenly likening both the Afghan war and last year's invasion of Iraq to Vietnam - focuses overwhelmingly on the bad news coming out of Iraq. There is plenty of bad news - but there is also much good, and it is being almost completely ignored.

Some Members of Congress - either out of a passion to defeat President Bush, pique at not being listened to by the Bush administration, or simply a need to hear their own voices - are declaring the war "unwinnable" or "a quagmire," or are demanding an "exit strategy."

Both the media and Congress are obsessed with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It is awful, but both institutions are treating it as if it were the most important occurrence of the war.

...

This is a hard time in Iraq - perhaps, as Tom Paine once said, a "time to try men's souls." On the other hand, after the head of the Iraqi Governing Council was murdered this week, Iraqi national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rabai - a figure considered close to Grand Ayatolla Ali al-Sistani - declared that "these gangsters and terrorists will have to kill 25 million Iraqis who are longing for freedom, democracy and prosperity."

Sistani, arguably the dominant political actor in Iraq, is clearly siding with the United States against upstart Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr. That's good news. Americans should know more about it - and take heart.