Good news week for Iraq

Powerline has highlighted the large number of insurgents killed this week in Iraq. The Lone Voice continues along the same lines, with a number of of suspects detained for arms, traffic and people (foreign fighters) smuggling.

Tom Bevan, on Yahoo!, reports further signs of progress:

In my column today on the administration's early efforts to secure Baghdad, I note some of the signs of progress that have emerged from Iraq in recently. Here are three more from today: 1) The Washington Post reports that Sunni tribesmen joined with Iraq security forces to defeat dozens of insurgents in Western Iraq, 2) the Associated Press reports a sharp drop in the body count in Baghdad, and 3) The Los Angeles Times says that Iraqis who fled amid the earlier violence in their country are beginning to return home.

And it just keeps getting better, as Afghan Taliban says sending fighters to Iraq: TV. Sounds like desperation to me. Yet, more holy warriors won't be enough to defeat coalition forces. Especially in Afghanistan, where "Taliban gloomy" after Pakistani arrests, as Reuters reports.

Unfortunately for Democrats, this good news, coupled with sound arguments from the right, spell disaster for their policies. Victor Davis Hanson lays it all out:

Imagine if the House of Representatives had debated a resolution to authorize the president’s use of force in Iraq only after the bombs were already falling. And what if after the debate, in the middle of the war, with our troops already in combat, Congress had suddenly denied such approval?

That is precisely what happened to President Clinton during the Serbian war of 1999. Neither the Senate nor the House agreed to sanction the administration’s ongoing preemptive bombing campaign against Serbia. That congressional rebuke prompted liberal commentator Mark Shields to scoff on PBS Newshour that American troops were “putting their life on the line, and (the Congress) are saying, we’re not with you.”

Or consider the national mood in 1968 when the United States suffered over 16,000 American dead in Vietnam (at that rate, we lost more troops in three months than we have during the entire four-year Iraqi war). In response, riots racked the country. Protesters stormed the Democratic Convention in Chicago. And a polarized country saw both Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. gunned down.

Nothing in Iraq comes close to the furor over Korea, either. Again, suppose the following: President Bush conducts an ongoing public fight with the new commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who in turn serially whines to the press that he is being backstabbed by an unsupportive administration. Bush then fires Petraeus. The general returns to the United States to tickertape parades, while the president becomes even more detested as thousands more Americans are killed.

That scenario sums up the Truman-MacArthur row over the stalemate in Korea. During that conflict, President Truman fired Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson; fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur, his senior military commander in the theater; and faced calls for impeachment from U.S. senators, including the venerable Robert Taft. By February 1952, Truman’s approval ratings had hit 22 percent — the lowest-known polls of any sitting U.S. president, George W. Bush and Richard Nixon included.

During World War II, more than 1,000 Marines were killed in 72 hours on the tiny Pacific island of Tarawa, storming head on a Japanese stronghold that was considered at best an optional objective. The Time magazine photos of American corpses in the surf caused national outrage and calls for the resignation of widely respected Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Pacific veteran Gen. Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith said the senseless American slaughter was analogous to Pickett’s costly and futile charge at Gettysburg.

There have also been plenty of major policy failures in our history — a failed invasion of Canada during the War of 1812, a failed 12-year reconstruction of the south, a failed effort to help Chiang Kai-shek stop Chinese Communists under Mao, a failed effort at the Bay of Pigs to remove Fidel Castro, and a failed effort to stop communism in Southeast Asia, to name a few. Since World War II, our intelligence agencies failed to foresee the Chinese invasion of Korea, the Yom Kippur War, the fall of the Shah of Iran, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the sudden spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Cambodian and Rwandan holocausts, and the acquisition of the bomb by Pakistan and North Korea.

The high-stakes war to stabilize the fragile democracy in Iraq is a serious, costly and controversial business. But so have been most conflicts in American history. We need a little more humility and knowledge of our past — and a lot less hysteria, name-calling and obsession with our present selves.

And it's only been getting worse for the Democrats' policy errors. At least Congressman Kucinich has the stones and the principles: Kucinich Introduces HR 1234 To Immediately End the U.S. Occupation of Iraq. The same cannot be said for the panderous, back-stabbing (his fellow Democrats) Murtha, as his own party complains... Dems: Murtha Upstaging Pelosi:

To put it bluntly, as the former Marine is wont to do, Rep. John Murtha is rankling some of his fellow Democrats who worry his outspokenness sometimes upstages even Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

At the same time, Bush keeps pressure on Democrats on Iraq money, and a FOX News poll says: Nonbinding Iraq Resolution 'Waste of Time'

A majority of Americans thinks the U.S. House of Representatives was wasting its time passing a nonbinding resolution on Iraq. Nearly half say if they were in Congress, they would vote to continue funding the war, while the other half says they would vote against funding it as a way to force a withdrawal from Iraq. These are just some of the findings from a new FOX News Poll.

Good week for Iraq (and Republicans). Bad week for Democrats.