Lefties: Iraq Looking Up, Let's Leave

So now it's official. Every serious observer agrees that the situation is getting better in Iraq -- even those who hate the war the most. TomDispatch, a project of the Nation Institute, focuses on providing a "a clear sense of how our imperial globe actually works." It ain't exactly a neocon cabal. One recent post described "How the Bush Administration's Iraqi Oil Grab Went Awry." Another, from retired Lt. Col. William Astore, declared that, when it comes to Iraq, "it's time to save the military from itself."

*In the words of Kenny Rogers, "You've got to know when to hold
'em. Know when to fold 'em. Know when to walk away. Know when to run."
The reference to his hit song, "The Gambler," is not facile. The
Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote that war, in its complexities and uncertainties, most resembles a game of cards -- let's say Texas Hold 'em in honor of the President's adopted state. Over the last four-plus years, we've shoved hundreds of billions of dollars into the Iraqi pot, suffered sobering losses in killed-in-action/wounded-in-action, yet we're still holding losing cards dealt from a stacked deck. Even so, the Bush administration has recently doubled-down instead of folding, hoping to hit an inside straight despite long odds.
*

Why are we spilling blood and treasure with such reckless abandon?*

But even at TomDispatch, there's a sense that the facts on the ground in Iraq are changing. Today, *Mother Jones *and Rolling Stone writer Robert Dreyfuss observes that "there's really no disputing the improvement since August."

All in all, violence in Iraq has dropped precipitously since late summer. With Al Qaeda declared dead, former Sunni resistance fighters wearing American-supplied uniforms, and the Mahdi Army lying low, killings in Iraq are way down. The security situation in Iraq is far better than it's been at any time since 2005. Many American antiwar critics, who are invested in the notion that no good news can come out of Iraq and who (secretly or openly) revel in the Bush administration's
Iraqi failures, are reluctant to admit that things are getting better. *

Perhaps they worry that, if the situation in Iraq improves, the prospect of Democratic gains at the polls next November will diminish.
Perhaps they've convinced themselves that Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divide is so enormous that partition **is the only solution, and that Iraq doesn't deserve to be a country anyway. Perhaps their distaste for President Bush (which I share) is so all-consuming that they fear any improvement in the situation will be credited to the President -- something they can't tolerate. *

If so, that's perverse. The fact is: There is a critical window of opportunity opening for the United States to withdraw and for Iraq to hold itself together and rebuild. *

Now, of course, Dreyfuss draws a lesson from the shift in Iraq that you wouldn't exactly find in the pages of the *Weekly Standard. *

To the extent that things are getting better, that's good news. The majority of Americans -- from the left to conservative realists -- who want the United States to get out of Iraq quickly ought to seize this news and push for an acceleration of the momentum for withdrawal. Certainly, as the polls all indicate, this is the course Americans generally want their politicians to follow.