Will Democrats try to reverse the success of the surge?

Washington Post:

This time last year, Capt. Wes Wilhite's men were getting ready to move into an abandoned house in western Baghdad wedged between cells of Sunni insurgents to the south and strongholds of Shiite militias to the north.

Violence in the Iraqi capital seemed unstoppable. U.S. military vehicles were getting attacked with armor-piercing roadside bombs almost daily, and a raging sectarian war was Balkanizing once-mixed neighborhoods.

"A slaughterhouse," is how Steve Murrani, an interpreter working with Wilhite's men, described it.

The soldiers, who came to Iraq as part of President Bush's troop increase, began returning home last week. They leave with sunburned faces, calloused hands, tattered boots. On their wrists they wear black metal bracelets inscribed with the names of five soldiers killed on a clear afternoon in March, just as progress was starting to seem irreversible.

They leave buoyed by a sense of pride over dramatic security improvements they helped bring about. Violence in Iraq is at its lowest level in years, the rate of U.S. casualties has dropped since the United States began implementing a new counterinsurgency strategy last year, and Iraqi politicians have made some strides in bringing about political reconciliation. But the departing soldiers are also burdened by their losses, still unable to determine whether history will call their tour a turning point or a waste of time.

"Could this all fall apart?" Wilhite, 28, a tall, lean redhead from Milwaukee, asked in an interview in early July. He sighed. "Possibly."

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There is much more. It is mostly about what these men accomplished which is certainly a worthwhile subject.

But the real danger now is that Democrats who thought it would not work will do what they can to turn success into failure. The best way to make this fail is to be too precipitous in drawing down the forces in Iraq. Obama and the Democrats think they are just the guys to do that. One thing we know is that Democrats will never take responsibility for the messes they make and they will blame the Republicans and the troops for Democrat failures.

The best way to ensure failure is with rigid timelines for withdrawal instead of conditioned timelines.

There is still hope that voters will make Democrats pay a political price for being so wrong about the surge. That is the best way to keep the sacrifices of these troops from being in vain.