This Fall, Spring Forward

In Friday's WaPo, Michael Gerson calls Autumn "A Season of Hope in Iraq":

During their summer vacation, Americans discovered that Gen. David Petraeus doesn't take one. And his energy and urgency have shifted the Iraq debate in some fundamental ways.

A few months ago, it was the received wisdom that Iraq was in the midst of a rapidly escalating civil war. That claim is no longer plausible.

While the level of violence is still unacceptably high, the surge has disrupted the cycle of escalation and proved that progress is possible. Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno's briefing this month was an antidote to pessimism. "Total attacks," he said, "are at their lowest levels since August of 2006." Some of the most violent and lawless regions of Iraq, such as Anbar and Diyala, have been stabilized with the cooperation of local Sunni leaders who have turned against al-Qaeda thuggery. Insurgents are being pushed out of population centers and then targeted in further operations. Sectarian murders in Baghdad have gone down by more than 50 percent in a few months, reaching their lowest levels since the Samarra mosque bombing. And new sectarian provocations -- such as the al-Qaeda bombings in Nineveh -- have not resulted in the usual spiral of revenge murders.

With the surge fully in place only as of last month, the suddenness of these results is startling. Skeptical military experts have returned from Iraq with praise for the Petraeus strategy. And supporters of the war have been left to wonder: What if these approaches had been employed a year earlier?

As the summer began, it seemed that Republicans in Congress were on the verge of mass defections over the president's conduct of the war and ready to embrace Democratic timetables for withdrawal. While Sen. John Warner's recent call for symbolic troop reductions by Christmas didn't help the administration's case, it is now mainly Democrats who are recalibrating their message. . .

Four months ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could confidently declare: "This war is lost." Now that is an open question. A recent Zogby poll found that a majority of Americans do not believe the war is lost. And this makes Democratic policies based on the assumption of hopelessness -- rigid timetables and funding cuts -- strategically irresponsible and politically risky. If defeat is inevitable, it makes sense to cut our losses. If defeat is only possible, preemptively ensuring it would confirm a long-standing Democratic image of weakness.

As AJ Strata says:

Democrats are finally at the point where they climb off the limb they crawled out on last fall and winter, or they saw it off on themselves. If they come down to hard or too pessimistic they will be rejected by the American people as so incompetent they can only figure out how to lose, not win. That is not the American way. It probably is the Democratic way though, especially given the insanity permeating their voting base. It is time to see if the left is so obsessed they will continue to fight and argue for defeat -- at all cost and no matter the gains. Then they will have cemented their place in history -- as losers extraordinaire.