Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

The Democratic Party's worst political nightmare is America winning in Iraq, so they can't be happy with today's report in the New York Times of all places, from Michael E. O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, two war critics who, after an extensive visit to Iraq, find that it is "a war we might just win."

They write:

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily "victory" but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Their conclusion: "There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008."

In other words, the "surge" is working - and it is working because the increase in American troop numbers was accompanied by a shift in strategy that is producing results.

Remember that the next time you hear Harry Reid declare that "the war is lost" and realize that when the Democratic Senate Majority Leader says such things, he isn't speaking from knowledge and expertise but is, instead, attempting to speak his preferred reality into existence, in order to help Democrats win big in the '08 elections.

Democrats have long misread polls showing American unhappiness with the Iraq war as support for withdrawal rather than an expression of American unhappiness with losing. A military strategy that moves America toward victory in Iraq - even if "victory" as what O'Hanlon and Pollack describe as "a sustainable stability" - is likely to produce rising support for the war among the American people - and a political debacle for the Democrats, who have pinned their 2008 electoral hopes squarely on continued bad news from Iraq.

In fact, the NYT has already noted twin polls showing a small but significant increase in support for the Iraq war:

In the poll conducted last weekend with 889 adults, 42 percent of the respondents said the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, and 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out.

There was also a drop in the number of people who said the war was going badly. In the latest poll, 66 percent of Americans said things were going badly for the United States in its efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq. That is down from 76 percent who said the same thing in May..

As long as the surge continues to show progress, anti-war sentiment will continue to decline. Remember: even when polls showed a big majority of Americans unhappy with the war, that included millions of Americans who were unhappy not because we were in Iraq, but because we weren't winning. They are not prospects for voting for more of Harry Reid's surrendercrats.

Republican candidates for president, senator and representative all need to understand that the vast majority of Republicans want to see America win in Iraq - as do many moderate Democrats like those who inhabit much of the southern and southwestern state, the kind of people we once called "Reagan Democrats."

Even Hillary Clinton knows that - that's why she, unlike Barack Obama, refuses to kowtow to the extremist Left, for whom "victory" in Iraq is not only thought not possible, but not desired either.