Progress in Iraq and the Green Zone attack

Charles Krauthammer has a very good column today with a short summary of the preliminary signs of progress that we have seen so far since General Petraeus took over and then turning to the Democrats' moves to ensure defeat.

How at this point -- with only about half of the additional surge troops yet deployed -- can Democrats be trying to force the United States to give up? The Democrats say they are carrying out their electoral mandate from the November election. But winning a single-vote Senate majority as a result of razor-thin victories in Montana and Virginia is hardly a landslide.

Second, if the electorate was sending an unconflicted message about withdrawal, how did the most uncompromising supporter of the war, Sen. Joe Lieberman, win handily in one of the most liberal states in the country?

And third, where was the mandate for withdrawal? Almost no Democratic candidates campaigned on that. They campaigned for changing the course the administration was on last November.

Which the president has done. He changed the civilian leadership at the Defense Department, replaced the head of Central Command and, most critically, replaced the Iraq commander with Petraeus -- unanimously approved by the Democratic Senate -- to implement a new counterinsurgency strategy.

John McCain has had no illusions about the difficulty of this war. Nor does he now. In his bold and courageous speech at the Virginia Military Institute defending the war effort, he described the improvements in Iraq while acknowledging the enormous difficulties ahead. Insisting that success in Iraq is both possible and necessary, McCain made clear that he is willing to stake his presidential ambitions, indeed his entire political career, on a war policy that is unpopular but that he believes must be pursued for the sake of the country. How many other presidential candidates -- beginning with, say, Hillary Clinton-- do you think are acting in the same spirit?

All good points. Of course, there are those such as Senators Kerry and Reid who rushed to say that this is all whistling past the graveyard and pointed to the bombing of the Iraqi Parliament within the Green Zone to show that there is no progress being made. I would reply to those critics by saying that their reaction is just what the terrorists are aiming for. They are aiming at the will of both the Iraqi and the American people to keep up the fight. And the quick reaction of those who use such attacks to argue for withdrawal are providing exactly the response the murderers are hoping to provoke.