The last best hope

Harry Reid was despondent after the all-night Senate session produced yet another defeat for the Democrats.

“We did the very best we could,” he said. “I strongly believe we should have a bipartisan foreign policy…We need to do something to change the course of the war."

“We need to do something to change the course of the war.”

What that “something” is has been and remains a mystery.

After his pre-emptive declaration of defeat in April, the majority leader has nothing to offer. His plaintive cry for “bipartisanship” may play well with the blue-state ponytails, but the fact is, to compromise with Reid means to accept defeat in an arena that just two years ago was described as “not an option.”

It also plays well with AQ, and Baathist elements in Iraq who have only to hold out and continue to murder civilians with the knowledge that Reid will deliver to them a victory that they are unable to win themselves.

I do hope you take the opportunity to read Mike Yon’s latest dispatch from Baqubah, 7 Rules: 1 Oath. Yon’s dispatches from Operation Arrowhead Ripper have provided some of his most compelling writing since Mosul. And, given the fact that the western media has largely decided to sit the war out, Yon’s on-line magazine has become one of the very few outlets for real journalism in this difficult, and often brutal struggle.

His closing paragraph gave me more reason for optimism than I’ve had since the surge began.

Seeing “God is Great” written on the Iraqi flag might provoke some to protest “Why did we come here just to stand up a country who would write such things on their flag?” But I sat there in that meeting, which was completely civil and professional, and I thought about another flag, the one flying over South Carolina. Some people call that flag “heritage,” while others call it “hateful,” “painful” and “demeaning.” And today in that meeting, I thought about the descendants of slaves who are now top military commanders in the American Army, and in that moment I knew that Iraq could make it.

Reconstruction officially took twelve years in the US, and unofficially took one hundred years. It’s going to take the Iraqis a while as well. And, just as the Democrat party has become the last best hope for an AQ victory in Iraq, it is the US Military’s leadership of the counterinsurgency that is providing the last best opportunity for the Iraqis to make it.