And... John McCain relishing some justifiable desserts:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), fresh off his latest visit to Iraq, told This Week's George Stephanopoulos that "significant progress" is being made in reducing sectarian violence thanks to President Bush's decision to send an additional 30,000 U.S. combat troops to the war zone.

McCain, who is trying to ride the improved security situation in Iraq to an improved standing in the polls, took shots at several Democratic candidates, including Sen. Hillary Clinton ( N.Y.) and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), for their suggestion that the United States should begin withdrawing its forces from Iraq soon.

"Is that the same Sen. Clinton that said she had to suspend disbelief in order to acknowledge to that the strategy of the surge was succeeding?" McCain said in reference to Clinton's statement that the United States should stop trying to intervene in a "civil war" in Iraq. "Clearly, it's succeeding. You would have to suspend disbelief to believe that it's not."

McCain later said Clinton's support for a phased withdrawal from Iraq "would have been a catastrophe for the United States of America."

"Look, now the same people who were saying seven or eight months were saying you can't succeed militarily, we've succeeded military. Sen. Edwards used to call it the 'McCain strategy.' He doesn't call it that anymore," McCain claimed. "Their record is wrong on this. My record is right."

Labels: capitulation, Clinton, Congress, democrats, Iraq, mccain, Obama, white flag

Victor Davis Hanson gives Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams a just deserved history lesson.

I suggest that the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams read a little history about the British experience in India before he offers politically-correct but historically laughable sermons like the one he gave to a Muslim "lifestyle" magazine:

[Bishop Williams:] It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly, that's what the British Empire did - in India, for example. It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put it back together - Iraq, for example.
ONE, who is clearing the decks and moving on? And who are the "other people" putting Iraq back together? Iran? Saudi Arabia? China? The British in Basra? First, we read from the anti-war Left that the US is wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of its lives in Iraq, and yet now that we are clearing the decks and not putting it back together? Which is it?

TWO, Williams should read a little about British military campaigns in India, and then count the corpses.

THREE, he should also tally up the amount of money the U.S. has spent for civic and economic development in Iraq over four years, and then compare that to what Britain invested in any four-year period in their centuries-long occupation of India.

FOUR, I don't recall the British, after their second year in India, fostering nation-wide elections.

FIVE, if he is worried about the soul of civilization in general, and the U.S. in particular, he might equally ask his Muslim interviewers about the status of women in the Muslim world, polygamy, female circumcision, the existence of slavery in the Sudan, the status of free expression and dissent, and religious tolerance ( i.e., he should try to visit Mecca on his next goodwill, interfaith tour) .

SIX, all Williams will accomplish is to convince Episcopalians in the U.S. not to follow the Anglican Church, and most Americans in general that, if they need any reminders, many of the loud left-wing British elite, nursed on envy of the US, still petulant over lost power and influence, and scared stiff of the demographic and immigration trends in its own country, are well, unhinged.

Labels: antiwar loonies, appeasement, capitulation, defending liberty, Iraq, white flag

[AP] "Every place you go you hear about no progress being made in Iraq," said Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid. "The government is stalemated today, as it was six months ago, as it was two years ago," Reid told reporters, warning US soldiers were caught in the middle of a civil war.

"It is not getting better, it is getting worse," he said.
Reid was just as wrong back in April, when even before the Petraeus surge reached full strength Reid declared Iraq "lost."

Harry Reid is hardly well-travelled vis-a-vis Iraq. Reid hasn't been to Iraq since 2005, when the situation was vastly different, and worse. So I'll trust those who are there now, who have no cause or profit to gain, embedded there, who sweat amongst the troops -- men like Yon, Trotten, Emanuel.

As for Reid: Reasonable people can argue "wait and see." Reasonable people can argue caution. But only the most cynical of defeatist and pessimist fools could claim that Iraq was "getting worse." Reid's argument is not one of reason, but of desperation.

Reid is a modern day Clement Vallandigham. During the American Civil War, Congressman Vallandigham was the United States' most vocal antiwar, anti-Lincoln voice. He was king of the Copperheads, Butternuts, Peace Democrats. But just as he was wrong then, so is Reid now.

Using his own words, Jennifer Weber's book Copperheads paints Vallandingham as a subversive and disloyal fool. His speech before Congress in January 1863 sounds eerily as defeatist and truth-twisting as the speeches from so many Democrats today, Reid included.

[Vallandingham about Lincoln] Soon after the war began the reign of the mob was… supplanted by the iron domination of arbitrary power. Constitutional limitation was broken down; habeas corpus fell; liberty of the press, of speech, of the person, of the mails, of travel, of one’s own house, and of religion; the right to bear arms, due process of law, judicial trial, trial by jury, trial at all; every badge and monument of freedom in republican government or kingly government—all went down at a blow; and the chief law-officer of the crown—I beg pardon, sir, but it is easy now to fall into this courtly language—the Attorney-General, first of all men, proclaimed in the United States the maxim of Roman servility: Whatever pleases the President, that is law! Prisoners of state were then first heard of here. Midnight and arbitrary arrests commenced; travel was interdicted; trade embargoed; passports demanded; bastiles were introduced; strange oaths invented; a secret police organized; "piping" began; informers multiplied; spies now first appeared in America. The right to declare war, to raise and support armies, and to provide and maintain a navy, was usurped by the Executive...

you have utterly, signally, disastrously—I will not say ignominiously—failed to subdue ten millions of "rebels," whom you had taught the people of the North and West not only to hate, but to despise.… You have not conquered the South. You never will. It is not in the nature of things possible; much less under your auspices. But money you have expended without limit, and blood poured out like water. Defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchres, these are your trophies.… The war for the Union is, in your hands, a most bloody and costly failure.
As the Union Army slowly turned the tables -- and under new leadership with Generals Grant and Sherman, among others, performing their own "Surge" -- Vallandingham's rhetoric became more crass and delusional. Reid and his fellow Democrats follow that same formula today.

But it's not by accident that on a daily basis one can find news relating more killing and capturing of al Qaeda in Iraq, arresting of Iranian agents, discovery of bomb emplacements and weapons depots. The Petraeus surge provided enough protection for Iraqi informants to safely begin cooperating with the US military.

All are taking notice. All but today's Copperheads.

Though not with the saturation or visibility that fairness dictates even the New York Times has taken a few moments to pause from their Bush hatred. Even the nation's most liberal voice has begun to hedge its bets: Headlines today alone include, "Fewer Roadside Bombs in Iraq, U.S. Says," and "Iraq to Spend $19 Billion on Projects."

Fortunately, Iraqi citizens have a bit more optimism and courage than our "leaders" on Capital Hill.

Michael Yon reports from the St John's Church in Baghdad -- yes you read that right -- just a few days after the community of Muslims and Christains joined together to raise the cross on the building. According to Yon, Most Reverend Shlemon Warduni, Auxiliary Bishop of the St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Diocese for Chaldeans and Assyrians in Iraq, performed an official "Welcome Home" service, a bilingual Arabic and English one at that.

Today, Muslims mostly filled the front pews of St John's. Muslims who want their Christian friends and neighbors to come home. The Christians who might see these photos likely will recognize their friends here. The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John's today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, " Come back to Iraq. Come home." They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. "Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq ."

...The interpreter "Ice," pictured here with members of the congregation outside St John's after mass, grew up in this neighborhood. His family is Christian and St. John's is their church. I asked Ice if the Muslims treat the Christians poorly in Iraq, and he said what other Iraqi Christians and Muslims have also told me: an unequivocal "No." Ice said they had no problems at all until al Qaeda instigated friction between people.

... It's been a long time since I've seen any fighting. I can't remember my last shootout: it's been months. The nightmare is ending. Al Qaeda is being crushed. The Sunni tribes are awakening all across Iraq and foreswearing violence for negotiation. Many of the Shia are ready to stop the fighting that undermines their ability to forge and manage a new government. This is a complex and still delicate denouement, and the war may not be over yet. But the Muslims are saying it's time to come home. And the Christians are saying it's time to come home. They are weary, and there is much work to be done.
Just yesterday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), under the guise that "American people voted for change," claimed a need to withdraw US forces because they were "refereeing a civil war." Two weeks ago House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D, WI) claimed that violence must have declined in Iraq because terrorist groups "are running out of people to kill."

As Yon's reporting - among others - shows, Democrat prognostications and assessments aren't just off the mark but are often ludicrous too. The "change" for which the American people voted did occur -- in the form of a winning strategy by Gen. David Petraeus.

The more progress we make in Iraq the more the Democrats appear desperate to surrender Iraq. But that's the bed they made. The Democrats almost to a person decided to tie their party identity to defeat in Iraq.

Labels: capitulation, Congress, Delusional Democrats, Iraq, Petraeus, white flag

We've all heard the stories, many true, some apocryphal, of soldiers returning home from Vietnam only to be disrespected and shunned by an ungrateful nation. How many were called war criminals or spat upon is as controversial as it is unknowable. But there's one thing we know our troops never experienced. We never filled the movie theaters during wartime with films calling them war criminals, rapists and, figuratively, spitting on them or on their mission.

Not so today. Hollywood has been churning out antiwar movies at a blistering pace of late, with more to come. We've already had Rendition, a tendentious, plodding assault on the war on terror, seemingly as-told-to by the ACLU, starring Reese Witherspoon, Peter Sarsgaard, Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhaal. There's the meandering In the Valley of Elah, written and directed by Paul Haggis, about a family dealing with a cover-up of their soldier-son's death in an unnecessary war. The Kingdom, more exciting than most, deals with an FBI team's attempt to investigate a terrorist attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia. Its antiwar credentials come from suggesting that the sworn lawmen (and women) investigating the slaughter of families playing softball are no better than the murderers.

Coming next month: Lions for Lambs, starring Tom Cruise, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep — which gives every indication of being a theatrical version of a loaded question from Helen Thomas at a White House briefing — and Redacted, a fake documentary directed by Brian De Palma, in which U.S. troops are depicted as dehumanized rapists. Next spring comes Stop Loss, starring Ryan Phillippe, the supposedly heroic soldier who refuses to fight. And there are a slew of antiwar books being adapted for the screen as well.

To be sure, many of these films don't attack the troops directly. Some are thoughtful in their critiques, others less so. Regardless, this is still uncharted territory. "These movies certainly are more willing to be critical of the military and misconduct of individual soldiers. Certainly no such feature was made like these during ... the Vietnam War," Charles Ferguson, a political scientist and creator of the anti-Iraq war documentary, No End In Sight, recently told The Philadelphia Inquirer. But here's the interesting part: So far, these movies are tanking. Rendition opened on 2,250 screens, with three Oscar winners in the cast, and it was beaten its opening weekend by a re-release of the 14-year-old A Nightmare Before Christmas. Elah was a bigger bomb than those used in the "shock and awe" campaign. The Kingdom earned less than $50 million, and surely only did that well because it was marketed as an action movie rather than an antiwar one. Jeanine Basinger, a film historian at Wesleyan University, speculates that "these films are coming forward during the progress of a war and questioning it sooner may mean that the general public is rejecting what our leaders are telling us ... and want to know more about the war."

This is an odd, yet unsurprising, interpretation in an age when The Daily Show is a primary news source.

The public doesn't get to decide what movies are made. As President Bush might say, Hollywood is the "decider." The public determines which movies are successful. Perhaps the studios of yesteryear knew something today's moguls don't. Maybe Americans don't like to see America and her troops run down, even during an unpopular war.

When Peter Berg tested The Kingdom on Americans, he was horrified when the audience cheered when the FBI killed the terrorists at the end. "Am I experiencing American bloodlust?" the director agonized. Berg's contemptuous reaction toward American audiences may point to a few of the reasons these movies are faring poorly at American box offices.

First, economics. Hollywood cares less and less about what Americans think of their products because as domestic movie attendance has declined, Hollywood shifted its aim to foreign markets. In America, filmmakers are at pains to insist their antiwar fare isn't anti-American. No such distinctions need be made when these films open at Cannes, Venice and Toronto. Denouncing the war isn't only good marketing in Europe, it's the fastest route to critical acclaim.

Second, Americans may not be as passionately opposed to the war as the polls have led Hollywood to believe. Left-wing bloggers, hyper-rich Democratic donors and antiwar activists hate the war with biblical fury. But many average Americans are depressed by the war because, until recently, it was going so badly. The polls don't capture this distinction very well.

This illuminates an underdiscussed dynamic of our times. Americans are both antiwar and anti-antiwar. Polls show they are disgusted with Republicans and Democrats. Hollywood and the left generally have misread this political discontent thinking there's a mandate for their trite Vietnam-era nostalgia for mass protest and Joan Baez speechifying. But few Americans are eager to spend their money to listen to the Jane Fonda set say, "I told you so!" for two hours. Especially not when we've heard it all before. (Indeed, Redacted is essentially a remake of his Vietnam movie Casualties of War.)

By confusing the public's war-weariness with their own carefully cultivated rage, they've badly overreached. Rage may be a good box office draw; exhaustion isn't. The late film critic Pauline Kael is reported to have said that Nixon couldn't have won because she didn't know anybody who voted for him. Similarly, maybe everyone Paul Haggis knows shares his hatred for the war, but he just doesn't know enough people to make a hit.
-- Jonah Goldberg

Labels: antiwar loonies, capitulation, Hollywood bias, Iraq, white flag

Get a load of the opinion which Democratic Senator Jim Webb wrote in 1995 for Strategic Review. Of it, radio personality Mark Levin commented: "Jim Webb, now the antiwar senator . . . Today, four years into this war . . . he insists we do exactly what he condemned 12 years ago."

Media depictions of the fighting typically showed tired and frustrated American and South Vietnamese soldiers, while often using stock propaganda footage of communist troops marching cheerfully down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The elders who made their names in younger days on such allegations as U.S. troops lying about their "body counts" gave almost no mention of the horrendous communist military casualties, despite the most newsworthy item of those few weeks: the Hanoi government officially admitting it lost 1. 1 million soldiers dead and another 300,000 still missing from the fighting, compared to American losses of 58,000 and South Vietnamese of 254,000. And few discussions recalled the Hanoi pledge in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that Vietnam would be reunited only by peaceful means, with guarantees of individual freedoms in the South, as well as internationally supervised free elections.

To the contrary, on the heels of Mr. McNamara's comments regarding the "unwinnable" strategy he concocted and failed to adjust during the first four years of war, media air waves were filled with a litany of speeches proclaiming "vindication" by those who otherwise might have been forced to answer hard questions regarding their conduct and beliefs during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For some, such conduct was betrayal. For others, it was only a stupefying naiveté. But for most, there has been a persistent conspiracy of silence that has lasted for decades, accompanied of late by an attempt to leap over the carcasses and the devastation that followed the communist takeover, to simply pretend it did not happen.

When forced to comment, those who opposed our attempt to assist the building of a democracy in the South picked up the debate in its present makeup, pointing to the Hanoi government's efforts in the past few years to liberalize the economy and reach out to the Americans in the wake of the collapse of their Soviet ally and the continuing menacing growth of the Chinese.

As a consequence, the best opportunity of a lifetime was lost for the many who still wish to put a generation's most bitterly divisive period into proper historical perspective.
So what's changed since 1995 senator, other than the party holding the Oval Office.

File under "But That Was Then."

Labels: democrats, Iraq, quitters, white flag

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi:

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi challenged the president over Iraq by sending him a letter, ahead of a White House meeting later on Wednesday.

"As many had forseen, the escalation has failed to produce the intended results," the two leaders wrote. "The increase in US forces has had little impact in curbing the violence or fostering political reconciliation.

"It has not enhanced Americas national security. The unsettling reality is that instances of violence against Iraqis remain high and attacks on US forces have increased. In fact, the last two months of the war were the deadliest to date for US troops."
This just in... The Allied forces lost the battle at Normandy, 1944.

How do we know this? Well, it was a massive troop surge but the casualty rates for both Allied and German troops skyrocketed -- thus the escalation must have been a failure, at least by the logic of Harry and Nancy.

With such "leadership" by very definition the US could never possibly win another battle.

Ironically comical, just a few hours after their joint statement was sent to the press, USA Today released its interview with the commander of all coalition forces in Iraq, General Dave Petraeus - that is, the guy who actually knows what the hell he's talking about:

BAGHDAD — When Gen. David Petraeus drives through the streets of Iraq's capital, he sees "astonishing signs of normalcy" in half, perhaps two-thirds of Baghdad.
"I'm talking about professional soccer leagues with real grass field stadiums, several amusement parks — big ones, markets that are very vibrant," says Petraeus, commander of the roughly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The scenes provide a sign that the new strategy in Iraq is working, although many problems remain, he told USA TODAY in an interview Wednesday.
Hey, who needs enemies when you have Democratic leaders acting as our fifth column and inciting defeatism?

Labels: capitulation, democrats, flip-flop, Iraq, Petraeus, quitters, white flag

"How many more suicide bombs must kill American soldiers before this president offers a timeline for our troops to come home?"
-- Rep. Patrick J. Murphy (D-Pa.)

Actually, a better question is: "How many suicide bombs will kill American citizens back home should capitulating Democrats succeed in pulling American forces from Iraq too soon?"

Enemies see the retreat as weakness, call it the old strong horse/weak horse comment Osama bin Laden made. And no longer fearing our responses and knowing our lack of resolve, they will follow.

Murphy continues:

"How many more military leaders must declare the war will not be won militarily before this president demands that the Iraqis stand up and fight for their country?"
This comment is, what they call in the Queen's English, "Utter crap." No American military leader has ever claimed that the war cannot be "won militarily." Not one. What they have said is that the war in Iraq cannot be won by the military alone, requiring political and economic success as well. Democrats are thus knowingly misrepresenting the military's opinion. And while the military is requesting a three-pronged strategy, the Democrats offer just one: surrender to Islamic terrorists.

Labels: capitulation, Iraq, quitters, war on terror, white flag

The fellas at Scrappleface.com have a great satire of the defeatist Democrats, and sadly the humor is about as close to reality as it can get.

April 20, 2007
Reid Supports the Troops Who Lost the War
by Scott Ott

(2007-04-20) — Attempting to clarify yesterday's statement that the war in Iraq is "lost", Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said today that he "supports the troops who lost the war."

In an audiotape recorded from an undisclosed location and released through Al-Jazeera TV, Sen. Reid said, "The troops who lost the war should hold their heads high, because not everyone can be a winner, and they gave it a good try."

CIA analysis of the tape indicates the voice is "almost certainly" Sen. Reid's and that references to recent events show that the Democrat leader may still be at large, in good health and "substantially in charge" of his network of Democrat senators.

On the tape, Sen. Reid also said, "It's not the fault of our troops that they represent an evil regime, or that they wear the uniform of the nation viewed by many as 'the Great Satan.'"

The Nevada Democrat said he looks forward to welcoming the troops home, so that many of them can "lay down their weapons and return to the world of decent and honorable work."

Labels: capitulation, democrats, Francophiles, Iraq, quitters, white flag