Blue Dog balance of power in House saves intel bill

Washington Times Editorial:

For the first time during 110th Congress, the Blue Dog Coalition — a 47-member grouping of self-described moderate and conservative Democrats — defied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership on a critical national security issue: Saturday night's vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), where 41 dissident Democrats, nearly all of them Blue Dogs, provided the margin of victory for President Bush on the issue of terrorist surveillance. Thanks to the Blue Dogs, the administration's commonsense proposal to clarify that FISA permits U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor telephone calls made by foreign terrorist suspects outside the United States without first obtaining a warrant was approved by a 227-183 margin.

The key question now is whether Mr. Bush's success on FISA might be an indicator of what is to come next month when Gen. David Petraeus delivers his much-awaited progress report on the situation in Iraq — specifically, whether a significant minority of Democrats could be persuaded to join with Republicans to give the troop "surge" in Iraq a chance to secure enduring, long-term gains: a process that will take months — and in all likelihood, years.

In contrast to the gloom and doom of recent years, there have been a series of hopeful signs in recent months. Those signs include a series of successes in Anbar province, where violence has dropped dramatically this year. And in a recent op-ed in the New York Times by Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, scholars at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, who visited Iraq last month, wrote that they were "surprised" by the successes they saw. "We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms." Even opponents of the war like Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Bob Casey, who just returned from Iraq, admitted yesterday that the American military has made significant progress there in recent months. But it remains to be seen whether this can be translated into votes on Capitol Hill.

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It will be up to the Blue Dogs to save themselves and their party from an error of significant proportion on Iraq after the September report by Gen. Petraeus. They need to start exercising the power they have by joining Republicans as supporters of victory in this war.