Mark Steyn On The Democrats On Iraq

Oh the joy of finding another great Mark Steyn column (HT: WorldNetDaily). This one appeared in Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, came out with a big statement on Iraq last week. Did you hear about it? Probably not. Everyone was still raving about his Democrat colleague, Rep. Jack Murtha, whose carefully nuanced position on Iraq is: We're all doomed unless we pull out by next Tuesday! (I quote from memory.)

Also, the United States Army is "broken," "worn out" and "living hand to mouth." If the reaction to Murtha's remarks by my military readers is anything to go by, he ought to be grateful they're still bogged down in Iraq and not in the congressional parking lot.

It's just about acceptable in polite society to disagree with Murtha, but only if you do it after a big 20-minute tongue bath about what "a fine man" he is (as Rumsfeld said) or what "a good man" he is (as Cheney called him) or what "a fine man, a good man" he is (as Bush phrased it).

Ann Coulter recently devoted an entire column to the "fine man" talk coming out of the Republican Party. Sadly, both Coulter and Steyn are accurate on that point. But that's another topic.

On the Democrats' view of Iraq, Steyn has this to say:

Peter Worthington, the Canadian columnist and veteran of World War II and Korea, likes to say that there's no such thing as an unpopular won war. The Democrat-media alliance are determined to make Iraq an exception to that rule.

There are so many ways of viewing the success or failure of our efforts in Iraq, and darn-near all of them point to success or the promise of soon-to-be-success. On the political side, we have Autonomy, Preliminary Elections, Constitutional Draft, Constitutional Approval, and the coming Elections next week. On the military side, Steyn sums it up this way:

In three-quarters of the country, life has never been better. There's an economic boom in the Shia south and a tourist boom in the Kurdish north, and, while the only thing going boom in the Sunni Triangle are the suicide bombers, there were fewer of those in November than in the previous seven months.

Then there's the spill-over effect on Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Jordan, and even the people in Syria.

But the Democrats can't see victory even if it grabs them by the lapels and shouts in their faces. Instead they want to declare that we've lost ("It's Vietnam all over again!"), take their little green plastic army men, and go home.

The Defeaticrats' loss of proportion is unworthy of a serious political party in the world's only superpower. In next week's election, the Iraqi people will shame them yet again.

I can't wait.

Update:

Wonderful post over at Malott's Blog on this topic. He opens with a line from the movie "Patton:"

"Thirty years from now, when you're sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you, "What did you do in the great World War II," you won't have to say, "Well... I shoveled sh__ in Louisiana."

And then he closes this way:

And when we are asked what role the Democrats, mainstream media, and other members of the anti-war movement played in the struggle, we will recount the attacks on the Commander-in-Chief in a time of war for political gain... the questioning of our morality that saddened the families of soldiers while their loved ones fought so far from home... the way they encouraged our enemies by dividing our country, weakening the resolve of so many... or maybe we will just smile and say, "They shoveled sh__ in Washington."