On war--Dems have no heart or mind for fight

Daniel Henninger:

Is it uncharitable to suggest that when the fighting erupted in Basra last week between Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the U.S.-trained Iraqi army, some opponents of the war hoped it would become George Bush's Tet Offensive? That is, a battle whose military details are largely irrelevant, but whose sudden violence "proves" to voters that a U.S. military commitment is unwinnable and should be abandoned?

It was hard not to miss the antiwar spin coming off reports of the fighting, after a year of unmistakable gains from the Petraeus surge strategy.

An Obama foreign policy adviser, Denis McDonough, said it "does raise a handful of concerns as it relates to the surge and, more importantly, about the prospect of political reconciliation." The New York Times noted that Hillary Clinton, campaigning in Pennsylvania, said the Bush commitment to keeping up troop levels in Iraq is a "clear admission that the surge has failed to accomplish its goals."

The Democrats appear so invested in a failure that a half-week of violence erases a year of progress. What is the source of such instincts?

Walter Cronkite's Feb 17, 1968 broadcast about the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive concluded with words that remain famous even now: "[I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could." Attend an Obama or Hillary rally and the message in those 40-year-old words echoes loudly, and are cheered again.

Democrats have a love-forget relationship with the politics of the Vietnam years. The current tranche of congressional leaders is proud of its youthful opposition to John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. It is generally agreed, though, that the antiwar legacy damaged Democratic credibility with voters in presidential elections. After the Carter interregnum, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush trumped their opponents on national security.

Most of the time, the national Democratic party is at pains to avoid the label "San Francisco Democrats" that was coined by Jeane Kirkpatrick in her devastating "Blame America, First" speech to the 1984 GOP convention. Bill Clinton's famous 1996 triangulation strategy was designed in part to avoid this national-security virus, which is thought to sit dormant in the brains of blue-collar Reagan Democrats, always alert for an excuse to bolt right. John McCain will offer himself as that excuse. On the handling of Iraq alone, Gallup recently gave Mr. McCain a 14-point lead over either opponent.

The Democratic left never apologized for its antiwar politics. It abhorred Clintonian centrism. The newest generation of "progressives," unabashedly descended from the San Francisco Democrats, wants the party rooted in the worldview and attitudes that came to prominence during Vietnam.

One can rediscover that worldview by watching the Academy Award winning 1974 documentary about Vietnam, "Hearts & Minds." This film, by director Peter Davis and producer Bert Schneider, stands as a useful, explicit demarcation for an American political culture that broke in half during the 1960s and '70s.

Toward the film's end, Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, casts off the preceding generation when he tells the camera that Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all "lied." He adds: "We weren't on the wrong side" in Vietnam. "We are the wrong side." By this, the movie makes clear, is meant in part that America had become dangerously enamored with a culture rooted in martial values. The problem isn't the military, which is inevitable. The problem is militarism.

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Democrats have a profound ignorance of warfare and particularly counterinsurgency warfare. When Pelosi talks about war without end, it is clear she has not a clue about counterinsurgency warfare where 90 percent of the time the insurgents lose and on average it takes 11 years for that to happen. We are not half way there and are doing very well and she and other Democrats want to quit.

There eagerness for defeat can also be seen in their "analysis" of the Basra fight. Despite the rhetoric of both sides, it was a battle for real estate and not annihilation. The government wanted control of the real estate in Basra and the ports where the oil is shipped. Guess what? Sadr gave them that after a brief fight. The government will now have better control over the shipment of its oil and Sadr will have less control. That sounds like a strategic victory that Sun Hsu would be proud of.

The fight also showed that Sadr's forces are more like cock roaches than an effective fighting force. They can mess things up from time to time, but they can't take ownership of the house. As for Maliki's rhetoric, while it might have been overheated at times, his objective was always to get the Sadr forces out of the way with the least blood shed. That is why he gave them two different deadlines to stop fighting and withdraw, which they eventually did.