The more things change, the more things stay the same.

[dude1394]

Pretty amazing cartoon. Larger image at link.
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/20...rheads-of.html

Democrats haven't changed a lick in 143 years as you can tell from this 1864 political cartoon by Thomas Nast:



Dave Clark sent this very revealing 1864 campaign poster a while back and described the uncanny comparisons to today's anti-war party:

1.) Showing the enemy soldier stronger and more resilient than our own. Here the southern soldier (enemy) is upright and strong, the northern (US) broken and dejected.
2.) The "useless war" on the tomb. Even then the pessimist couldn't see the righteousness of the conflict.
3.) The flag flown upside down in a distress display; even then they saw little hope and only failure.
4.) The grieving widow.


My, God! We know the outcome of that war, and if not for the strength and foresight of President Lincoln (and a new willingness for sacrifice from the soldiers) did the north come out victorious in the end. This poster was produced in 1864. The former battlefield failure General McClelland was running on the democratic ticket as the peace promoter - a position opposite of the president- just like today.

I send this awed by it's similarity to today's anti-war voices.

[Dirkadirkastan]

Therefore, we'll win! Just like Vietnam!

Oh, the similarities!

[dude1394]

Well it does appear we won't surrender like vietnam.

[dude1394]

From the houston chronicle. Couldn't have said it better meself.

http://www.examiner.com/a-1065010~Ed...s___again.html

Editorial: Editorial: Abandoning the troops - again
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Filed under: , The Washington DC Examiner Newspaper , DC Editorial
Nov 23, 2007 6:21 PM (7 days ago) by The Washington DC Examiner Newspaper

There are encouraging signs that the tide in Iraq has finally turned in favor of the United States. Many media outlets have finally admitted that the military surge begun five months ago is working, including the stubbornly persistent anti-war New York Times, whose front-page, lead story on Tuesday confirmed dramatic security gains. Confidence in Iraq’s economic and political future has increased so much that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are returning home from exile. People are venturing out to formerly abandoned parks, shops and restaurants in Baghdad, where civilian casualties are down by a stunning three-quarters since early summer.

Even more astounding, the Anbar Awakening has now spread to other areas in Iraq. Thousands of Sunnis and Shiites have joined forces, and together are turning against al-Qaeda and foreign-paid insurgents who have been butchering their families.

Yet long after it became apparent that Gen. David Petraeus’ brilliant counter-insurgency strategy was getting results, Congressional Democrats refused to acknowledge any progress - despite the evidence of a dramatic turnaround - exactly the kind of tangible progress Democrats demanded from Petraeus when he testified before Congress in September.

He has delivered. They have not.

House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee chairman John Murtha continues to parrot Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s unsubstantiated belief that victory in Iraq is unattainable. They’re both apparently still reading from an old 2006 political script in which they promise to end the war - but not to win it.

The Democrats’ current refusal to release $50 billion in supplemental war funds without withdrawal strings attached (which they know will be vetoed) is more than a disturbing inability to adapt to changing circumstances on the ground. By deliberately choking off funds at this critical juncture, they are threatening the Pentagon’s ability to consolidate the dramatic economic and political gains in Iraq that the military surge has allowed, virtually assuring a self-prophesized U.S. defeat.

The stakes are so high that Defense Secretary Robert Gates warns that as many as 100,000 civilian employees will have to be furloughed beginning next month if supplemental war funding is not approved and he is forced to dip into other accounts to support combat troops in the field.

This political game of chicken, played exclusively for political gain, is one of the most morally reprehensible examples of troop abandonment since the Vietnam War. A veteran like Murtha should be ashamed of himself.

[dude1394]

And from the San Diego Union Tribune. Maybe Dingy Harry and Nancy Pelosi are right after all and everyone else is just delusional. It appears to take a willing suspension of belief to believe all of these people.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniont...e25caldwe.html

Now, a winnable war

By Robert J. Caldwell
November 25, 2007

The stunning turnaround in U.S. military fortunes in Iraq is now so obvious that it's getting page-one treatment and network/cable broadcast time by an American press long preoccupied with reporting this war's negatives. There are lessons here for anyone who will examine the facts in Iraq, perhaps even for Democrats in Congress and those running for president whose unchanging mantra remains “we've lost, get out now.”

The evidence, building month by month since the surge in U.S. troop levels last spring and summer, is unmistakable.

Violence is down all across Iraq, in Baghdad by 75 percent. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, long the primary terrorist threat, has been routed. Thousands of Sunni insurgents who were once avowed enemies of coalition forces and the Iraqi government have switched sides. The Sunnis, appalled by the terrorists' tactics of indiscriminate mass murder, are now fighting al-Qaeda and cooperating with the Americans and with Iraq's security forces. U.S. casualties are running at two-and three-year lows.

Sectarian reconciliation, while still stalled at the national level, is taking root at the local and provincial levels. Iraqi refugees sheltering in neighboring Syria and Jordan are beginning to return to neighborhoods made livable again.

So, what do we learn from all this?

First, the troop surge so roundly denounced by those who had given up on Iraq worked. Putting five additional combat brigades (about 30,000 troops) into central Iraq, notably Baghdad and its successive belts of suburbs and satellite cities, reclaimed Iraq's capital from the car bombers and sectarian death squads.

Just as important as the additional numbers of troops was a fundamental change in U.S. military strategy and tactics. Troops were pulled out of their heavily fortified mega-bases and deployed, neighborhood by neighborhood, in local security stations together with Iraqi soldiers and police. This tangible presence provided both security and invaluable intelligence on who the terrorists were, where their arms caches were hidden and the attacks they were planning.

It produced the two indispensable ingredients of successful counterinsurgency warfare: Protection for the civilian population and actionable intelligence on the enemy.

Al-Qaeda has been run out of Baghdad and its surrounding cities, an area comprising the demographic and military center of gravity in the struggle for a stable Iraq. Providing security to a heretofore frightened and intimidated civilian population is yielding a flood of intelligence tips on the terrorists and sectarian killers. A measure of popular Iraqi support for coalition security efforts is the formation of local self-defense groups, called, prosaically, Concerned Local Citizens. In little more than the past six months, 70,000 Iraqi civilians have joined hundreds of these CLC groups to assist in protecting their own neighborhoods.

All this is evidence of a counterinsurgency campaign gaining critical mass against an increasingly discredited enemy.

The troop surge also served an additional purpose vital to stabilizing Iraq.

Sending more U.S. forces and establishing the local presence previously lacking were tangible proofs to Iraqis that the United States was committed to its mission in Iraq. The message to millions of Iraqis was that they would not be abandoned, either to a murderously ruthless terrorist enemy or to uncontrolled sectarian violence in a country that barely a year ago seemed poised on the brink of civil war.

The psychological transformation this reassurance is producing in Iraq is potentially decisive.

Without it, the Sunni sheiks and their tribes wouldn't be changing sides and casting their lot with the Americans and a Shiite-dominated Iraqi central government. Without renewed confidence in the resolution of coalition forces, tens of thousands of Iraqis wouldn't be joining the CLC groups and turning in the bombers and killers in their midst. Without a demonstration of American determination to get the job done in Iraq, the Shiite militias of Muqtada al-Sadr wouldn't be standing down and observing a truce with coalition forces.

The surge has also sent a sobering signal to Iraq's neighbors, Syria and Iran especially, that America is not running. Syria is stopping more al-Qaeda recruits at its border with Iraq and Iran appears to be scaling back its arms supply to al-Sadr's militias.

No, the war in Iraq is not over. The gains this year may not yet be irreversible. But a drawdown in U.S. combat forces in 2008 now looks feasible without conceding defeat. A war America and its Iraqi allies were losing a year ago now looks winnable, after all.

Caldwell is editor of the Insight section and can be reached via e-mail at robert.caldwell@uniontrib.com

[dude1394]

Investors Business Daily...
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArti...81319376567713

Murtha's Muddle

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, November 30, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Iraq: After years of leading Congress' cut-and-run forces, John Murtha, House Appropriations defense subcommittee chairman, believes the surge is working. The Pelosi Democrats don't know if they're coming or going.

Related Topics: Iraq

How exactly can House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defend the obstruction of $200 billion in emergency combat operations funding for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan when one of her closest cronies, the Vietnam vet she tried to install as House majority leader, now believes America is winning the war there?

Murtha's "Road to Baghdad" conversion may not have knocked him to the ground with a blinding light. But it's certain to throw congressional Democrats for a loop as it exposes their years of blindness on the importance of winning in Iraq as part of the global war on terror.
Pelosi and Murtha back in January, when both were still on the same page and convinced the surge then getting under way would never work.

Pelosi and Murtha back in January, when both were still on the same page and convinced the surge then getting under way would never work.

Only last summer Murtha was calling belief in the chances of President Bush's new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, with a new commander and 30,000 fresh troops and Marines, "delusional to say the least."

"I'm absolutely convinced right now the surge isn't working," and "there's no way you're going to have success," he told ABC in June. In other venues, Murtha has accused the Pentagon of lying in reporting that the surge was effective.

But in the wake of his trip to Iraq last month, Murtha said in a videoconference from his congressional district office, "I think the surge is working."

This while the congressman insists that $50 billion is all Bush will get for Iraq and Afghanistan this year.

Murtha also made the usual complaints about lack of political progress and reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites — in spite of the fact that thousands of Sunnis and Shiites are now working together manning checkpoints and conducting other security operations directed against al-Qaida in various regions of Iraq.

Two months into the new fiscal year, the Democratic Congress has failed to pass almost all its annual spending bills. Yet Democratic leaders such as Murtha, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada don't seem to feel even a tinge of shame in whining about a society that, deeply divided ethnically and religiously for centuries, has been unable to iron out all its divisions overnight.

Representative government is alien to the Arab Middle East. What right do Democrats in Congress have to expect Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and the various factions of the Iraqi parliament instantly to do what it took the genius of America's founding fathers and Constitutional framers many years to achieve?

Beyond the embarrassing questions now sure to be asked of Pelosi about Murtha's unexpected flip-flop, and Democrats' crass unreasonableness toward a people who risk their lives to exercise the voting rights we take for granted, there's something bigger for Pelosi, Reid and the Democrats running for president to think about:

Murtha, like so many other high-ranking Democrats in the House and Senate, and those seeking the White House, was "absolutely convinced" that surrender was the only answer in Iraq.

They were so sure of their position that when the party's 2000 vice-presidential nominee, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, placed patriotism before the party line, they actually let someone take the Democratic senatorial nomination away from him and tried, without success, to beat him in his 2006 bid for re-election.

Democrats have invested everything in losing the war in Iraq and blaming it on President Bush, and now they've been proved wrong. Murtha has admitted it; other Democrats, one by one, will follow.

How much faith can Americans place in a party so committed to a national failure — and now so discredited?