The Discerning Texan

It is far too early to declare victory but you would think that all Americans and Australians, regardless of whether they supported the war in Iraq or not, would want to stick with a strategy that is delivering peace and security to a people who have suffered not just 4 1/2 years of a brutal insurgency but also three decades of tyranny and war. Yet some Democrats in the US, as with some on the Left in Australia, are still determined to lose the war if possible by withdrawing troops, even when success is starting to appear to be within reach. Undaunted by the fact that there has been an improvement in Iraq, Democratic staffers on Congress's Joint Economic Committee are trying to generate more bad headlines by focusing on the cost of the war, which they calculated would reach $US3.5 trillion by 2017. To arrive at such a massive total, the committee threw in everything they could think of, including their best guesses at the Iraq war's impact on oil prices and other economic factors.

The sad fact is that for most of the anti-war Left, the only thing that matters is delivering a defeat to the Bush administration, and in achieving that end the Iraqi people are expendable. John Pilger said in January 2004 that while he didn't like the "terrible civilian atrocities" committed by what he called "the resistance", "the outcome of this resistance is terribly important for the rest of the world" and that only a defeat in Iraq of the US "military machine" and the Bush administration would make our world secure. As Christopher Hitchens wrote despairingly in 2005 of his erstwhile friends on the Left, while there is plenty of support for debt relief and making poverty history in Africa, there isn't a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq.

The anti-war, anti-American Left should be ashamed, but precisely for this reason they continue to look away when Iraq doesn't fail in the way they wish. The success of the surge has become their inconvenient truth.