As Fred Barnes notes, the biggest battle in the most important theatre of the Iraq war – inside the Beltway – has been an upset win for the President:

An astonishing turnaround occurred in the Senate on Tuesday: 70 senators voted to fund the Iraq war with a fresh $70 billion and no strings attached. Think about this a moment. Last winter, after Democrats captured the Senate and House, it seemed likely they’d succeed in limiting or ending the Iraq war, probably by setting a firm timetable for withdrawal of American troops. After all, both President Bush and the war itself were highly unpopular. The Democratic triumph in the election made that clear, even to those who doubted opinion polls. And Democrats made the anti-Iraq crusade their top priority in the new Congress. Now, the 70-vote approval of the war by the Senate represents the breathtaking dimension of their failure.

How close – and how big an upset – was it?  Barnes notes the number of anti-war measures the majority spawned off in its first few months – and the number of Republicans that jumped ship, and the narrowness of the defeats.

But what if one of the anti-war measures had passed? True, Bush would have vetoed it and chances are Senate Republicans would have mustered the 34 votes to sustain his veto. But congressional passage of a bill limiting the war would have been politically disastrous even if it didn’t go into effect. It would have undercut the president, galvanized the opposition, and most likely prompted a stampede of congressional Republicans away from support for the war.

Everything changed, of course, when General David Petraeus, the Iraq commander, testified before Congress in September. He said there had been measurable success in reducing violence in iraq, including a sharp drop in American casualties. Since January, Petraeus had been carrying out the new Iraq policy that Bush had announced in January to add troops – the so-called surge – and implement a new counterinsurgency strategy. By the time the Senate voted on Tuesday, the decline in violence in Iraq had become more dramatic.

Read the whole thing.