Success Has A Thousand Fathers, Part IV

When even Susan Lenfestey gets on board and declares the surge a success, you know you’re onto something.  Right?

Well, surely the Dems do know there’s something there; they’re phrasing that something as “we never doubted the US military’s ability to pull this off.

Except, as Jeff Kouba catalogues, they surely did:

Here’s the intrepid Susan Lenfestey on how she of course duh! never doubted The Surge would work:

Fair enough. We’re all exhausted from the divisiveness of this war, so in the holiday spirit — and with my fingers crossed — I’ll take a break from the rancor and say what he wants to hear: The Surge is Working.

But the doubt was never about the prowess and might of the American military, or that adding more troops would offer short-term security. …

The doubt was never about the prowess and might of the American military?

*bemused, a puzzled look tugs at his brow*

In the 12/3 issue of the The Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery did a tremendous job of logging the many statements made by Lefties concerned their solid belief in the inevitable success of The Surge.

Jeff pulls out a number of examples showing that, on the hard (and not-so-hard) left, there most definitely were doubts! 

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t all those examples at least a vague, nebulous indication that perhaps our patriotic Democratic Left harbored at least a few, secretly held, never voiced in public niggling doubts about The Surge?

Read both pieces.

5 thoughts on “Success Has A Thousand Fathers, Part IV

  1. Let’s not move the goal posts here. The Primary goal of the Surge, per the President in January when he spoke to the nation from the Oval Office, was to turn over Iraqi security to the Iraqis by/in November. It is now December 21, and we are not much closer to doing that then we were 11 months ago.

    The President is losing me, one of the few that has hung on this long. I don’t like being played for a fool, and after all these years of chasing our tales, I am beginning to wonder if those of us that continue to support this President’s policies in the War on Terror aren’t the last fools left.

    We’ve spent enough time killing people, I think it is getting really close to getting these different factions to the table and figuring this out humanely, or maybe just pulling back to the perimeter and letting them fight it out on their own while making sure it doesn’t spill over onto out soil, or that of our allies.

    Flash

  2. “we are not much closer to doing that then we were 11 months ago.”

    Here’s the latest security report

    http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/FINAL-SecDef%20Signed-20071214.pdf

    A small summary

    “all remaining Iraqi provinces are set to transition to provincial Iraqi control in 2008. Of the 18 provinces, nine have already transitioned. The report also mentions that 61 of the 125 Coalition forward operating bases have been closed or transferred to Iraqi forces. ”

    “There are nine more IA battalions in the fight than there were in the last report (ed. — 3 months ago). Seventy-seven percent the Army battalions can plan and execute operations with little or no support. The IGFC controls 11 divisions, 37 brigades and 113 battalions as of November 2007.”

    “The President is losing me, ”

    Go ahead and bail, your support won’t really be missed.

  3. Here’s Joe Biden back in January of 2007:
    “I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost,” Biden said. “They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy — literally, not figuratively.”
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/04/AR2007010401525.html?sub=AR

    And here’s a presentation that Robert Kagan, godfather of the surge, gave a month earlier in Dec 2006: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/RCP_PDF/ChoosingVictory.pdf
    I guess Biden didn’t get the memo.

  4. we are not much closer to doing that then we were 11 months ago.

    You might want to rethink that position, Flash. 11 months ago all we were hearing was “sectarian violence” and “insurgency”. Now the Sunnis are cooperating, the Shia are cooling their heels and the biggest problem is the Kurds pissing off the Turks.

    That’s quite a bit of progress, if you choose to be honest.

  5. We might have to cut Flash a bit of slack here. He is fresh from a gathering of the left’s brightest lights.

    Check it out…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQiq2Fr88A4

    Now, be honest, if you had spent several hours tippling with that bag of assholes, don’t you think you’d be dazed and confused too?

    Until she showed up I was worried that “Da Wedge” had consumed MNkNOB. Fortunately it appears that his corpulence is nothing more than evidence that our welfare system in Minnesota is indeed, veeery generous.

    Oh, BTW…How cool was drunken, homeless Santa? Heh.

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