Good news from Iraq will destroy Democrat cohesion

Washington Post:

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Monday that a strongly positive report on progress on Iraq by Army Gen. David Petraeus likely would split Democrats in the House and impede his party's efforts to press for a timetable to end the war.

Clyburn, in an interview with the washingtonpost.com video program PostTalk, said Democrats might be wise to wait for the Petraeus report, scheduled to be delivered in September, before charting next steps in their year-long struggle with President Bush over the direction of U.S. strategy.

Clyburn noted that Petraeus carries significant weight among the 47 members of the Blue Dog caucus in the House, a group of moderate to conservative Democrats. Without their support, he said, Democratic leaders would find it virtually impossible to pass legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal.

"I think there would be enough support in that group to want to stay the course and if the Republicans were to stay united as they have been, then it would be a problem for us," Clyburn said. "We, by and large, would be wise to wait on the report."

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Actually the Democrats desperation for defeat is foolish on several levels including the political one discussed by Clyburn. Wretchard points out:

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... In a complex event like a military campaign, there will be ups and downs, good days and bad days. New enemies may join the conflict. Others may drop out. Fortune and technological discovery can change the course of events. During the Second World War, Stalin was once Hitler's ally; then later his most implacable foe. Up until 1942 the Second World War went one way and after that it went another. But if Germany had developed the Atomic Bomb first it may have gone yet another. Nothing was "official" until V-J Day. But in Washington DC nothing has a life apart from the official partisan view. Not even the sun shines. Instead it is assigned a shadow existence, fitted into a narrative, and tortured into a Procrustean bed of arbitrary political specification.

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These problems are complicated by the modern Democrat party's ignorance of history and warfare. They ebb and flow of battle has been erased from their memory bank. The concept of a thinking enemy who reacts on barely slips in there too. Eighteen months ago the enemy in Iraq was in a desperate situation after the completing of elections that formed a government. The enemy developed a desperate strategy to provoke fighting by Shia militias killing Sunnis in the hope that the chaos would either bring the Sunni states to their rescue or get the US to leave. The faint hearted Democrats seized on the "sectarian civil war" theme as a mantra for quiting. In other words the al Qaeda strategy would have worked if Democrats had been in power.

Now that al Qaeda is once more on the run, there are many Democrats denying they were ever part of the conflict. They still see a civil war, where even the media now sees reconciliation. They cling to the glacial pace of Iraqi legislators as a sign of failure rather than a sign of democracy.