Recently, a small news item buried in my local paper reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Iraq and was quoted as saying that she, “welcomed that country’s progress in passing a budget as well as oil legislation and a bill paving the way for the provincial elections in the Fall that are expected to more equitably redistribute power among local officials.”  Only three months earlier she told CNN, “The purpose of the surge was to create a secure time for the government of Iraq to make the political change to bring reconciliation to Iraq, they have not done that. The gains have not produced the desired effect, which is the reconciliation of Iraq. This is a failure. This is a failure.”
A year before the democrats’ “no political progress” argument was disproved, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) proclaimed, “Now I believe myself . . . that this war is lost, and that the surge is not accomplishing anything.”  By Dec. ’07, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), one the top war critics, stunned fellow democrats with his statement that "the surge is working."  Murtha's view was backed by Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), who also said the surge worked after he returned from Iraq.
Before President Bush ordered the Surge, democrats uniformly proclaimed that Iraq had descended into civil war, yet Sunnis rejoined and Muqtada Al-Sadr’s Shiites have remained in the Government and Al Qaeda in Iraq had all but been defeated.  When it became apparent that the Al Qaeda and Iranian-inspired and supported civil war didn’t succeed, democrats tried to diminish the stature of Iraq’s leadership by claiming that (it) would not commit the Army against Sadr’s militia.  After Sadr’s thugs were routed in Basra by the predominantly Shiite Iraqi Army, democrats have now moved the ‘goal posts of progress’ once again.
Today, the standard democrat line is that Iran has been strengthened because America took out Saddam.  In the defeatist world of liberals, Iran developing nuclear weapons and fomenting revolution in Iraq is our fault, if only we’d left Saddam in power he’d have checked Iran’s desire to inflict fundamental Islam throughout the Middle East and destroy Israel.  Iran held Americans for 444 days during the Carter Administration, has funded and supplied weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah for decades and began developing nuclear weapons and rocket delivery technology many years before the U.S. removed Iraq’s dictator.
Every democrat argument against the Bush policy in Iraq has turned out to be a ‘red herring’.  Every time the facts-on-the-ground prove them wrong, they simply move ‘the goal posts of accomplishment’.  The truth is, that democrats don’t want to recognize any progress in Iraq, don’t want to get serious about containing Islamic Fundamentalism out of Iran and they don’t really care about the American troops or Iraqi civilians killed or wounded, except to exploit them for political purposes.