The Democrats problem with the truth about Iraq

Niall Stanage starts out with an overstatement of errors made by the Bush administration in the war in Iraq, but he eventually gets to a much more important point about this week's testimony from Petraeus and Crocker.

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... the judgments proffered by General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker also brought the intellectual inconsistency of the “Troops Out Now” segment of American liberalism into sharp focus.

Both men emphasized the havoc that would be the near-inevitable result of hasty withdrawal.

“A premature drawdown of our forces would likely have devastating consequences,” Mr. Petraeus said. He then referred to an intelligence report that enumerated some of the dangers, including a high risk of disintegration of the Iraqi security forces and a marked increase in sectarian violence and displacement.

Mr. Crocker expressed his certainty that “abandoning or drastically curtailing our efforts will bring failure, and the consequences of such a failure must be clearly understood. An Iraq that falls into chaos or civil war will mean massive human suffering—well beyond what has already occurred within Iraq’s borders.”

The gravity of those assessments stood in stark contrast to the shallowness of some of the arguments coming from the Democratic Party, many of whose members seemed to regard the Petraeus testimony as, more than anything else, a political inconvenience.

Even in the course of praising the general personally on the day of the testimony, Representative Ike Skelton, the Democratic chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said that General Petraeus was “the right person, three years too late and 250,000 troops short.”

That was a cute enough sound bite. But while it sought to replay for the millionth time the debate over how the U.S. got into the war in Iraq, it displayed no leadership or depth of thought about how to make the best of the current situation, and what responsibility America now bears to prevent things from getting far worse.

The Democrats looked bad this week because they were trying to cross examine witnesses who knew for more about the subject than the Democrats and who were more intellectually honest in their presentation. Just as they thought the August recess would help them turn Republicans against the war, they were mistaken in what they thought they could gain by asking questions that exposed their own ignorance and prejudice. Their approach to questioning also hurt them because many of their questions were based on erroneous assumptions. It is times like that when it is almost fun to be in the witness chair.