Democrats need to MoveOn to a different issue

Daniel Henninger:

Hillary Clinton, as the clock struggled toward the final hour of the Petraeus-Crocker hearings this week, reminded the two witnesses that it was September 11. "I started my morning today at Ground Zero," said the New York senator, not looking at the men but at the papers on the desk before her, "where once again the names of the nearly 3,000 victims of the attack on our country were read solemnly in the rain. We have seen Osama bin Laden reappear on our television sets, essentially taunting us. We have the most recent reports out of Germany of terrorists plotting against American assets, who have been trained in Pakistan."

These remarks were delivered without passion. It was expected that the Petraeus-Crocker hearings would be two days of high drama. They were not. Gen. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker were questioned about Iraq by Democrats on three full committees, including five candidates for the presidency, and the hearings were flat. Could it be the air is going out of Iraq as a hot political issue?

If true, it is good news. Good news, first of all, for this country, whose people may have grown tired of the war but are more so with the war's corrosive domestic politics.

Good news, too, for the Democrats. The Democrats in Congress need to put some space between themselves and the Web-footed antiwar movement. MoveOn.org's "General Betray Us" ad in the New York Times made it difficult for any Democrat to breathe fire at Gen. Petraeus. MoveOn.org pre-used all that political capital. A malady endemic to the Web is that much of the Netroots is essentially narcissistic. That ad proved it's more about them than about elected Democrats. The politicians had better figure this out. A marriage of two narcissists often proves difficult.

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More evidence that the politics of Iraq is losing altitude is that committee Democrats spoke less about violence and more about "reconciliation." Assuredly, if violence still floated, they wouldn't have spent so much time on Nouri al-Maliki and the internal politics of Iraq. The Democrats in Congress have become habituated to having outside forces, a deus ex machina, create and carry their arguments for them on the war. They waved opinion polls, which worked because the insurgency delivered so much bloodshed to the front pages. The Petraeus counterinsurgency has reduced that effect. So now the authority repeatedly cited at the hearings was the Government Accountability Office on reconciliation. The GAO isn't going to grip the public.

The hearings hurt Dems at the margins of the military debate as well. They've proposed, for instance, pulling U.S. troops back into primarily a "counterterrorism" role. But the hearings let Prof. Petraeus, an acknowledged expert on the subject, deliver a quick tutorial: "To do counterterrorism requires conventional as well as all types of special operations forces, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets." If the goal is to take away sanctuary from al-Qaeda terrorists, Gen. Petraeus said, "that is something that is not just done by counterterrorist forces per se but . . . by conventional forces as well." The ability to make these distinctions may be the reason the surge is producing progress.

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The Democrats have been given an opportunity to demonstrate their ignorance of counterinsurgency warfare and they have seized it. They will continue that demonstration at their own political peril in coming days as they search for new ways to lose the war.

Unlike Daniel Henninger, I see no good news for Democrats in this weeks event because good news from Iraq is bad news for Democrats who have been declaring defeat for weeks only to hear that they have been wrong about the military situation.

To continue to argue on the issue exposes their failure to comprehend events in the first place. At some point they are going to be challenged on their incompetence in military analysis and their fitness for office will be challenged.