As we purpose to make right, we may need to reconcile our neighbor Democrats.
Good news from Iraq is sustained, on top of which comes better news. Parties, mostly leftward, with every incentive not to reverse their disapproving stances, are turning around. Headlines started to echo what soldiers have repeated — enough time and the enemy can be outwitted, outmaneuvered and beaten. Monday, a pair of academics leaned back towards confidence by calling the Iraqi front "a war we might just win," even against impatience; in the New York Times, no less. On television, journalists acknowledged that Baghdad's government can, if it is allowed by a lengthened American mission, toddle in the direction of liberal sovereignty.
If the enemy loses Iraq, whatever remains among Islamist and Arabist terrorists will be forced to eat years of rodomontade, conceding a democratizing state where once ruled the world's second-worst tyrant. That will ease staunching of the Near East's current effluence and, through reform, preventing any more. A lot of totalists who aren't religiose maniacs might give up the ghost, having witnessed the basest criminals on earth failing first to knock the free world over, and then unable to outlast it.
Then there is the Democratic Party, caught unprepared by circumstances. Spoiled after a smooth couple of seasons? Probably, since members are still insisting that what is over there isn't. Once victory has existential import, verifying Iraq as a place that must be by Congress' own arguments won, Democrats — if they are unwilling to ally with the president — can only push further, and propose to cede every front, as some caucuses on the edge already have. Those are actions realized in the most distracted American mind as reckless. In the politician's mind, electoral non-starters whatever the national mood.
Reported from Capitol Hill, fair winds are, for the opposition, "a real big problem." Leftists, Democrats, want to resume support for the Iraqi campaign? Let them. One corollary: political repatriates must, to sincerely accredit trials and success, swear off partisan antipathy of George Bush.