Democrat candidates willful denial on Anbar awakening

Fred Barnes:

THERE'S A TRUTH THE Democratic presidential candidates can't handle: the success of the "surge" in Iraq. The addition of American troops and the adoption of a new strategy of protecting the civilian population has now dramatically reduced the level of violence in Baghdad and pacified other parts of Iraq as well. But the Democratic candidates insist on pretending otherwise.

It isn't clear whether they were uninformed, out of touch, mistaken, politically fearful, or knowingly dishonest when they were asked to comment on the surge during an ABC television debate Saturday night in New Hampshire. In any case, their refusal to acknowledge success in Iraq marked a low point in the Democratic campaign.

The most disappointing answer came from Barack Obama, the frontrunner in the race and a candidate who touts himself as one who would end political polarization in Washington and forge bipartisan solutions. But he's not likely to produce any bipartisanship on Iraq.

Obama claimed the decision by Sunnis in Iraq to embrace American forces was a response to the Democratic capture of Congress in the 2006 election. Sunnis in Anbar province "started to see, after the Democrats were elected in 2006, you know what?" They saw the likelihood of a withdrawal of U.S. troops and feared they "would be left very vulnerable to the Shias," Obama said. So they joined the Americans.

This is a figment of Obama's imagination. There's no evidence for this explanation--quite the contrary. Even before the 2006 election, Sunnis had begun to turn against al Qaeda, their one-time ally in the insurgency, and its brutal tactics. Their rebellion against al Qaeda even has a name, the Sunni Awakening. Desperate for help against al Qaeda terrorists that they turned to Americans.

The Sunni rebellion has now spread to other provinces, particularly those with mixed Sunni-Shia populations. And political reconciliation between Sunnis and Shia is underway at the provincial level. Obama should have known this. Perhaps he did but was wary of veering from his anti-Iraq position. His bizarre take on the Sunnis remains exclusive to him.

Bill Richardson was worse than Obama. Calling Iraq "a massive failure," he made a string of inaccurate claims. He said there had been no reconciliation. Wrong. He said there had been no sharing of oil revenues. Wrong. He said the Iraq government had made no effort to train more security forces. Wrong. He said there was only a political solution in Iraq but not a military solution. The truth is, both are required.

John Edwards provided a whopper of his own. He said the withdrawal of British troops from southern Iraq caused "a significant reduction in violence." In fact, it was the British presence--not the withdrawal--for so many months that had pacified that region.

Hillary Clinton also refused to acknowledge any success in Iraq. She reaffirmed what she told General David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, last September during a Senate hearing. Then, she said she had to "suspend disbelief" to accept Petraeus's testimony that the surge was working.

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The Democratic candidates have now left themselves in the embarrassing position of denying reality. And they are at odds with many Democrats who've traveled to Iraq recently and concluded the surge is succeeding.

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The Democrats have their time line off. This post on September 12, 2006, well before the election reveals the rejection of al Qaeda by the Anbar tribes and if you read the full story from the UK Times on which the post is based you find no mention by the sheiks of concern about the Democrats in congress. Obama is just delusional on that point. Here is a brief excerpt from the Times piece.

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A resident of Hit, a Sunni town west of Ramadi, gave a general account of life in the province that matched Mr Samarrai’s. He told The Times that the general population had turned against al-Qaeda but was too weak to drive the militants out.

“Al-Qaeda has assassinated too many people,” said the man, who did not want to be named. “If the resistance received support from the Government they could defeat al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda kills anyone who does not obey them. Most of them are criminal and known bad people.”

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That is the genesis of the Anbar awakening and it came only a couple of days after the Washington Post leaked a negative intelligence report on the situation in Anbar. This post on September 17, 2006 based on a story in the NY Times indicates that 25 out of 31 Anbar tribes have joined forces against al Qaeda.

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An American military official said tribes had fought Sunni Arab insurgents in Anbar in the past, but previously had not agreed to come together and fight them together. “Tribes just get fed up have fought them in the past,” an American military official said today. “This would be the first we’ve seen of tribes banding together.”

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Again there is no mention of Democrats taking over congress. In fact all of this started weeks before the election. What Gen. Petraeus was able to do is take advantage of this reaction to the abuses of al Qaeda and bring the tribes over to our side in the fight. That is the essence of counterinsurgency strategy and congressional elections have nothing to do with it. This big lie by the Democrat candidates should haunt them for the rest of the election period.

It should also be pointed out that if Obama and the Democrat policy on Iraq had been adopted that these Sunni tribes would have not had the help they needed to defeat al Qaeda. They would not have been able to spread their movement to the rest of Iraq where other tribal leaders joined the movement against al Qaeda. We would not have gotten the intelligence we needed to break the back of al Qaeda's operations in Iraq. In other words if we had followed Obama's policy for Iraq, we would have created a disaster and given al Qaeda a victory. What Obama is doing on Iraq is making things up the same way his spin doctors did on Pakistan recently. When people start focusing on the specifics of what he has been saying on these issues they should recognize he is not wise enough to be put in charge of American national security.