Harry Reid is right

By Libby
Updated below

Alleged Independent Joe Lieberman continues to carry the White House whitewash with this statement. The choice cuts:

Al Qaeda's strategy for victory in Iraq is clear. They are trying to murder as many innocent civilians as possible in an effort to reignite sectarian fighting and drive us to retreat from Iraq.

This is exactly the wrong time to conclude that we have lost the war in Iraq, or that our new strategy has failed. Instead, we should provide General Petraeus and his troops with the time and the resources to succeed. We should not surrender in the face of barbarism."

I see this is the emerging meme this week in the president's current dog and pony road show and among the few remaining loyalists. Blame AQ for what is obviously an upsurge in locally based sectarian violence in Iraq. Funny, I thought we had already chased the AQ out of Baghdad more than once and they're all hiding in Anbar.

According to reports, 230 people died from suicide attacks in the city of Baghdad yesterday. The surge supporters have been telling us for weeks now how this surge thing is working so well that violence is down, but as is typical when the news is bad, they blame the critics for demoralizing the troops. As if telling the truth is going to demoralize them more than being stuck in a (now extended) deployment from hell and witnessing the carnage with their own eyes?

The loyalists keep saying give it more time. Excuse me, but aren't these the same people who told us give Petraeus six months to prove his surge theory will work? Well it's been almost five months since Bush ordered the surge against the advice of his experts and in direct opposition to the will of the people. So where are those early signs of success again?

No reasonably objective observer could possibly claim the "surge" is working. For one thing, it's made painfully clear that we don't have the manpower since we haven't even been able to muster half the promised numbers of troops in all these months and nothing has changed. Baghdad experienced a temporary drop in civilian deaths, only to see increased violence in areas outside the city. Now even the formerly secure Green Zone is being breached regularly and as this week's slaughter demonstrates, any lull inside Baghdad is unsustainable in the long run.

Not to mention a key premise of the Petreaus plan was the stepped up training of Iraqi security forces - a central plank of the plan that has now been abandoned. The new, "new" strategy is to focus on security, meaning we're going to go back to routing out the insurgents on our own. How is this progress? And why should it convince us, as the deadenders like Lieberman suggest, to give it more time?

Harry is right. The war is lost and it won't be any less lost in six months or six years. The only thing that will change is there will be more dead bodies to count while we're waiting for the empty promise of a victory the supporters still can't define.

And speaking of empty-headed rhetoric, I expect the armchair military geniuses like these two, who so carelessly throw around accusations of treason, to be publishing their next posts from their family vacations in Baghdad. To hear them tell it, since the surge started, it's just about as safe as DisneyWorld now. I'm sure the lodgings are cheap and they would get to enjoy free fireworks at least three times a day.

Update: The Gun Toting Liberal makes a good point. The war by the orginal definition of the mission, was won long ago. What we have here is an arrogant and clueless administration who turned the initial victory into a long running defeat.