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Next to pulling out a pistol and shooting Harry Reid in the eyeball, Sen. Lieberman does the next best thing in his "What I Saw in Iraq" featured article in today's Opinion Journal. Here's the opening.
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recently returned from Iraq and four other countries in the Middle
East, my first trip to the region since December. In the intervening
five months, almost everything about the American war effort in Baghdad
has changed, with a new coalition military commander, Gen. David
Petraeus; a new U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker; the introduction, at
last, of new troops; and most important of all, a bold, new
counterinsurgency strategy.
The question of course is--is it working? Here in Washington, advocates
of retreat insist with absolute certainty that it is not, seizing upon
every suicide bombing and American casualty as proof positive that the
U.S. has failed in Iraq, and that it is time to get out.
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"Advocates of retreat" is more refined than "surrender monkey," but
equate. Of course Reid, and the democrats, long ago anted-up
their political future with a bet that we would lose the war, and
President Bush would be discredited. America wins, they
lose. Simple as that. A few more snippets, because they're
so delicious.
| “ |
 Consider
Anbar province, Iraq's heart of darkness for most of the past four
years. When I last visited Anbar in December, the U.S. military would
not allow me to visit the provincial capital, Ramadi, because it was
too dangerous. Anbar was one of al Qaeda's major strongholds in Iraq
and the region where the majority of American casualties were
occurring. A few months earlier, the Marine Corps chief of intelligence
in Iraq had written off the entire province as "lost," while the Iraq
Study Group described the situation there as "deteriorating."
When I returned to Anbar on this trip, however, the security
environment had undergone a dramatic reversal. Attacks on U.S. troops
there have dropped from an average of 30 to 35 a day a few months ago
to less than one a day now, according to Col. John Charlton, commander
of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, headquartered in
Ramadi. Whereas six months ago only half of Ramadi's 23 tribes were
cooperating with the coalition, all have now been persuaded to join an
anti-al Qaeda alliance. One of Ramadi's leading sheikhs told me: "A
rifle pointed at an American soldier is a rifle pointed at an Iraqi."
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Harry Reid, as a stand-in for the Democrat Congress, is pointing that rifle. Bang.
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