The downside to Dems investment in defeat

Investor's Business Daily:

Democratic senators visiting Iraq have seen for themselves that President Bush's surge strategy is working. But their party has so much invested in losing this war, they're muffling the good news.

Interviewed from Iraq, Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, last week admitted that our forces are "making real progress" there.

Durbin told CNN, "What we find is that the surge has troops going into areas where for 4 1/2 years we have not seen our military in action."

But back in January, delivering the Democratic response to the president's State of the Union address, Durbin called the proposed 20,000-plus new troops "too few to end this civil war in Iraq and too many American lives to risk on top of those we've already lost."

According to the Associated Press, freshman Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., who accompanied Durbin to Iraq, said in a conference call with reporters last week that a good argument could be made that U.S. troops have actually won the war in Iraq.

Yet Casey also told CNN last week that he was still right to have voted against the surge.

"The problem here," he said, "is that the president of the United States continues to insist on a stay-the-course policy, no change in direction, no sense that the American people can determine that there's a light at the end of the tunnel."

You can't have it both ways — yet that is exactly what Democrats are twisting themselves into contortions trying to do.

Contrary to Casey's Rip Van Winkle-like charge, President Bush's surge is, of course, a huge change in direction — and it's clearly becoming a light at the end of the tunnel that gets brighter almost by the week.

Even Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., last week conceded there has been progress.

Yet Democrats say never mind that we're winning; the Iraqi politicians are losing.

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The Editorial goes on to compare the problems in the Iraqi legislature with similar lack of results in Congress and some state legislatures. It misses the more compelling case of the grass roots reconciliation that the legislation was suppose to stimulate to begin with. That grass roots reconciliation should be a major theme of the September reports to cut off the Democrats arguments for failure.