Left can't forgive Bush for being right about Iraq

William McGurn:

In a few hours, George W. Bush will walk out of the Oval Office for the last time as president. As he leaves, he carries with him the near-universal opprobrium of the permanent class that inhabits our nation's capital. Yet perhaps the most important reason for this unpopularity is the one least commented on.

Here's a hint: It's not because of his failures. To the contrary, Mr. Bush's disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success. Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war they had all declared unwinnable.

Here in the afterglow of the turnaround led by Gen. David Petraeus, it's easy to forget what the smart set was saying two years ago -- and how categorical they all were in their certainty. The president was a simpleton, it was agreed. Didn't he know that Iraq was a civil war, and the only answer was to get out as fast as we could?

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- the man who will be sworn in as vice president today -- didn't limit himself to his own opinion. Days before the president announced the surge, Joe Biden suggested to the Washington Post he knew the president's people had also concluded the war was lost. They were, he said, just trying to "keep it from totally collapsing" until they could "hand it off to the next guy."

For his part, on the night Mr. Bush announced the surge, Barack Obama said he was "not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Three months after that, before the surge had even started, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pronounced the war in Iraq "lost." These and similar comments, moreover, were amplified by a media echo chamber even more absolute in its sense of hopelessness about Iraq and its contempt for the president.

For many of these critics, the template for understanding Iraq was Vietnam -- especially after things started to get tough. In terms of the wars themselves, of course, there is almost no parallel between Vietnam and Iraq: The enemies are different, the fighting on the ground is different, the involvement of other powers is different, and so on.

Still, the operating metaphor of Vietnam has never been military. For the most part, it is political. And in this realm, we saw history repeat itself: a failure of nerve among the same class that endorsed the original action.

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The left was desperate to lose in Iraq so they could use it as an excuse to avoid the use of force in the future. They are still desperately hoping to use Iraq in that manner even though we showed we can defeat insurgencies.

We won in Iraq not just because of the 20,000 additional troops, but because of a change in strategy and finally getting the Iraqis to own the war. To defeat an insurgency you need an adequate force to space ratio. The best way to do that is getting greater participation of host country forces. Petraeus was able to do that not only with the Iraqi army, but by turning neighborhood watch units. Together this greatly increased the force to space ration which made it almost impossible for al Qaeda to move to contact without detection. We also used UAVs as a force multiplier in this effort to detect the enemy movements. Democrats, other than Lieberman were dead wrong about this.

What I still find curious is that Democrats did not pay a political price for being so wrong. At least not yet. Of course the media did its best to ignore how wrong the Democrats were and continued the Bush bashing to this day, even after events have shown him right. One of the failures of the Bush administration was in not pushing back against these unprincipled attacks.

Joel Mowbray also discusses how Bush was right when it mattered most.