Victor David Hanson explains why the Democrats will have almost nothing helpful to say or do about the war in Iraq for the next several months. He gives four reasons altogether. Here's his first:
For all the talk of cutting off funds, redeployment, and pulling out, the new Democratic Congress will, at least for now, probably do nothing except speak impassioned words and make implicit threats. Here's why.
First, they have to digest what they have swallowed. Democratic critics had previously framed their opposition to the war in terms of a disastrous tenure of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld; a culpable indifference to the status quo in Baghdad and at Centcom; a failure to listen to the more intellectual generals such as David Petraeus; the "too few troops" mantra; and the lionization of Gens. Shinseki, Zinni, and other shunned military critics.
But now Abizaid, Casey, Khalilzad, and Rumsfeld are all absent - or about to be - from direct involvement in the war. The supposed villain cast of Cobra II and Fiasco has exited, and the purported good guys have entered. David Petraeus will, de facto, be in charge, not just in the strictly military sense, but, given the press and politics of the war, spiritually as well - in the manner that Grant by late summer 1864 had become symbolic of the entire Union military effort that was his to win or lose. Many of those officers involved in the "revolt of the generals" have now largely supported the surge - something Democrats themselves had inadvertently apparently called for when they serially lamented there were too few troops to win in Iraq.
All the old targets of the Democrats are no more, and it will take time for them to re-adjust the crosshairs to aim at men and policies that they have heretofore viewed sympathetically.
Read the rest. It's very good.
RLC