Admit It- The Surge Worked.

Peter Beinart of the Washington Post wrote this excellent opinion piece in December:

Admit It: The Surge Worked

I watched Obama refuse to admit that the surge worked in the clips I have seen of his interview with O'Reilly, and I didn't like it.

Beinart makes the following point:

"Moreover, even if the calm (in Iraq) endures, that still doesn't justify the Bush administration's initial decision to go to war, which remains one of the great blunders in American foreign policy history. But if Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record, his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

It's time for Democrats to say so. During the campaign they rarely did for fear of jeopardizing Barack Obama's chances of winning the presidency. But today, the hesitation is less tactical than emotional. Most Democrats think Bush has been an atrocious president, and they want to usher him out of office with the jeers he so richly deserves. Even if they suspect, in their heart of hearts, that he was right about the surge, they don't want to give him the satisfaction.

Yet they should -- not for his sake but for their own. Because Bush has been such an unusually bad president, an entire generation of Democrats now takes it for granted that on the big questions, the right is always wrong. Older liberals remember the Persian Gulf War, which most congressional Democrats opposed and most congressional Republicans supported -- and the Republicans were proven right. They also remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, when prominent liberals predicted disaster, and disaster didn't happen.

Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences. Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in the process. They consume partisan media, where Republican malevolence is taken for granted. They laugh along with the "Colbert Report," the whole premise of which is that conservatives are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb. They have never had the ideologically humbling experience of watching the people whose politics they loathe be proven right.

In this way, they are a little like the Bushies themselves. One reason the Bush administration fell prey to such monumental hubris was that it didn't take its critics seriously. Convinced that the Reagan years had forever vindicated deregulated capitalism and unfettered American might, the Bushies blithely dismissed liberals who warned about deregulation, or Europeans who warned about military force, on the grounds that history had consistently proved those critics wrong. "You want to know what I really think of the Europeans?" a top Bush official declared during the Iraq debate. "I think they have been wrong on just about every major international issue for the past 20 years."

Today, by contrast, it is conservatives who have been proven wrong again and again. Politically and intellectually, the right is discredited, and the arguments of its rump minority in Congress will be easy to dismiss. Liberal self-confidence is sky-high."

Beinart maintains that seeing the Bush administration flounder over and over again has actually put a younger generation into a position mirroring the Bush attitude because they have come to believe that a certain political position is always wrong.

In my own life, I know it to be true that no one position will always be right or wrong. Over time, you get to separate the wheat from the chaff of the right vs the left and so on in a host of issues.

Labels and ideology interfere with acknowledging the truth because they are the rationalizations of vanity and and a cause for attachment. We also cannot go against the orthodoxies of our group without sacrificing our membership in that group. But our group's ideals are usually not balanced by the opposite ideals, no marriage of yin and yang. Our identity comes right out of that one ideal placed at the top, all alone.

Social psychology experiments have demonstrated how people cave in and express agreement with what they know to be factually wrong, even in simple experiments on perception, in order not to be seen as different.

So, check the article, if you like, which is very well-written and do remember that "hope" and "change" kept Bush's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, as Obama's Secretary of Defense.

We know that Obama has conceded on the policy functionally, but not admitting  to it as a statement is not "change", but "more of the same". And, as Peter Beinert points out, admitting that the surge has worked is not to say that going in was the right idea in the first place.