The Absurd Report

Many observers, left and right, have begun to take note of the gap between the Democrats’ defeatist rhetoric on Iraq and the reality on the ground. Karl Rove observed in the Wall Street Journal last week that the Democrats’ stubborn insistence that the surge has failed makes them look out of touch and, worse, as if they were rooting for America’s defeat.

As McCain has pointed out, Americans are mature enough to accept and in fact support our many ongoing military obligations around the world. What they were unwilling to support was a high level of American casualties and an absence of any strategy for reducing them.

So the Democrats have boxed themselves into rooting against victory in a war that their arch enemy Bush began and that their new opponent vows to win. Hillary Clinton promises to “win the war in Afghanistan and end the one in Iraq.” The inconvenient truth is that the reasons for prevailing in Afghanistan apply equally in Iraq and the consequences of losing in Iraq would be just as dire as a defeat in Afghanistan.

For now she and the other Democrats have no other position they can advocate. To change course would mean that Bush and McCain were right and they were wrong about the surge’s success. They therefore continue to tell us that all is lost and nothing has changed.

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Criticism of Iraq Running on Empty By Debra J. Saunders

“The war in Iraq has come at significant cost to the American economy. It has led to a spike in oil prices, resulted in massive deficit spending,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued at a recent press conference.

The surge of U.S. troops in Iraq has brought positive changes to that war-ravaged country. What are Democrats, eager to win the 2008 election, to do? Simple calculus: The price of oil is up; we’re still at war. It’s obvious, then: Blame the war for high gas prices.

It’s economic fear mongering - with an added appeal for the anti-war crowd.

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Negative U.S. media linked to increased insurgent attacks

Researchers at Harvard say that publicly voiced doubts about the U.S. occupation of Iraq have a measurable “emboldenment effect” on insurgents there.

Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university’s Kennedy School of Government.

The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media, the authors conclude in a report titled “Is There an ‘Emboldenment’ Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq.”

The researchers studied data about insurgent attacks and U.S. media coverage up to November, tracking what they called “anti-resolve statements” by U.S. politicians and reports about American public opinion on the war.

“We find that in periods immediately after a spike in anti-resolve statements, the level of insurgent attacks increases,” says the study, published earlier this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a leading U.S. nonprofit economic research organization.

In Iraqi provinces that were broadly comparable in social and economic terms, attacks increased between 7 percent and 10 percent following what the researchers call “high-mention weeks,” like the two just before the November 2006 election. …

Erica Chenoweth, a postdoctoral research fellow studying terrorism and insurgency at the Belfer Center and a specialist in the statistical analysis of violent events who has read the study, told UPI that it was “a good one.” …

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Feds: Saddam Financed Lawmakers’ Trip

Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, they called for a diplomatic solution.

Prosecutors say that trip was arranged by Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a Michigan charity official, who was charged Wednesday with setting up the junket at the behest of Saddam’s regime. Iraqi intelligence officials allegedly paid for the trip through an intermediary and rewarded Al-Hanooti with 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil.

The lawmakers are not named in the indictment but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California. None was charged and Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said investigators “have no information whatsoever” any of them knew the trip was underwritten by Saddam.

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