NY Times -- Give credit in Iraq where it's due ... to Obama and the Democrats?

Yep, you bet. The history revisionists are out in force, and they're determined to give credit for the success in Iraq to the one group that so bloody hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. HT to Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee:

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda and Iraqi Shiites against pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq. There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national security credentials than that.

If he can pull this off? Salvage something positive from it?

Are you frigging kidding me? It was the Democrats who demanded that Bush get a declaration of war before going into Iraq, which WAS NOT NEEDED. (Just to be clear here, Iraq was still under the cease-fire agreement from 1991. Their continued flouting of UN resolutions, and firing at British and American warplanes in the agreed-to no-fly zones were violations of the cease-fire. Because of those violations, we didn't need a declaration of war, again. We already had a binding one thatled us to Iraq in the first place.) It was the Democrats who demanded a second declaration, just to make sure they were all on the same page. The Democrats were against the war once their votes were registered, and immediately began attacking the president. Once the nation was liberated, and the mistakes started rolling out with deployments and strategy, the Democrat's opposition to the war grew at an exponential rate.

Now we're not giving President Bush a pass on this. He made mistakes in Iraq after liberating the country. It came int he form of the native insurgency, and with an influx of al Qaeda fighters to bolster the clandestine ranks that were in Iraq prior to the invasion. As the insurgency grew, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi launched a bold plan to create an internal, religious civil war between Sunni and Shia by targeting the Al-Askari mosque. It worked.

And just as Democrats were gearing up to force the president to withdraw troops, President Bush tapped General David Petraeus to initiate and carry out the Surge strategy. Coupled with the Anbar Awakening, and getting the Sons of Iraq on board, the tide drastically turned against the insurgents and foreign fighters. Nearly every member of Congress who visited Iraq as the surge unfolded exclaimed surprise at how quickly things turned. Well, except for Democrats. When the final Surge brigades were in place, Harry Reid confidently pronounced the Surge a "failure." The Democrats immediately jumped on the bandwagon.

During the primaries Barack Obama repeatedly reminded voters that he had stood against the Iraq War from the start, and even voted against it. (He routinely neglected to tell voters he wasn't in the US Senate at the time of that vote, that his asinine vote was a non-binding one in the Illinois state senate.) He claimed on the primary trail that he saw no progress in Iraq despite the facts were obvious to anyone who was paying attention to the Surge's success. And now, we have victory in Iraq, but it didn't come from the Democrats. It came from the president, and it came from General Petraeus.

The Democrats had nothing to do with this. Let the history revisionists do their best to make the Democrats look like they're the ones who pulled this off. It's a blatant lie, and it's no surprise that it's the New York Times that's peddling this malarkey.

Publius II