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The Democrats’ Fairy Tale - New York Times
by ubernoir at 6:26 am EST, Jan 14, 2008

When President Bush announced the surge of troops in support of a new counterinsurgency strategy a year ago, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Democratic Congressional leaders predicted failure. Obama, for example, told Larry King that he didn’t believe additional U.S. troops would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that’s taking place there.” Then in April, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, asserted that “this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything.” In September, Clinton told Gen. David Petraeus that his claims of progress in Iraq required a “willing suspension of disbelief.”
The Democrats were wrong in their assessments of the surge. Attacks per week on American troops are now down about 60 percent from June. Civilian deaths are down approximately 75 percent from a year ago. December 2007 saw the second-lowest number of U.S. troops killed in action since March 2003. And according to Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of day-to-day military operations in Iraq, last month’s overall number of deaths, which includes Iraqi security forces and civilian casualties as well as U.S. and coalition losses, may well have been the lowest since the war began.
Do Obama and Clinton and Reid now acknowledge that they were wrong? Are they willing to say the surge worked?
...
It’s apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to acknowledge — let alone celebrate — progress in Iraq.
...
it is driven by a refusal to admit real success because that success has been achieved under the leadership of ... George W. Bush. The horror!

i hate to say I agree however the hypocrisy here is that the writer doesn't also point out that likewise there is a complete refusal by Republicans to acknowledge that the whole fiasco could have been avoided in the first place and that the invasion should never have happened in the first place. And was fundamentally immoral and that the US and co launched a war of aggression. A crime for which individuals were prosecuted at Nuremburg. A plague on both your houses.

PS Is George W Bush really to be commended for successfully scrabbling himself out of the mess he created. After costing the lives of several thousand American lives, several tens of thousand Iraqi lives, and upteen billion dollars.

I admit to being wrong about the surge and I want George and all those with blood on their hands to admit they were wrong for starting the war in the first place.

RE: The Democrats’ Fairy Tale - New York Times
by k at 11:14 am EST, Jan 17, 2008

ubernoir wrote:
I admit to being wrong about the surge and I want George and all those with blood on their hands to admit they were wrong for starting the war in the first place.

Quite frankly, this is *exactly* the point. It takes courage and honesty to stand up as a democrat and say, "You know what, the surge is helping. I was wrong." But that's not all it takes, unfortunately, because frankly the entire country and the entire world would see it as conceding not just that point, but the WHOLE GAME to the Bush administration.

Stupid and unfair? Of course, but that's the media we have now. Does anyone really thing the overall gestalt of the media would be "Dem concedes surge is working; Iraq as a whole still a giant debacle" ? Fuck no. It'd be "Dem concedes surge is working; Bush vindicated".

And, yeah, no democrats are willing to do that. It's not a function of being too stubborn to admit to being wrong, in and of itself. It's a function of knowing that journalism is dead, objectivity vacationing on Mars and honesty buried under heaps of advertising copy and strategic partnerships.

In other words, this

it is driven by a refusal to admit real success because that success has been achieved under the leadership of ... George W. Bush. The horror!

is quite true, but not entirely because the Dems are just too hard headed to acknowledge being incorrect, but because they'd be pilloried by everyone for doing precisely the right thing.

This is the most pernicious element of the current political climate in this country. It's absolutely destroying us. I'd like to believe that the way out is for the Dems to take the moral high ground and start being honest and genuine. Unfortunately, I believe that all that's going to do is ensure they never, ever get elected.

Fuck this country's broken media.