Controversy of the week | The Week UK

IRAQ: IT'S IN THE GOP'S HANDS—FOR NOW All of a sudden, President Bush and the Republicans have the upper hand on Iraq, said Kimberley Strassel in _The Wall Street Journal_. Until

this spring, the news from the war zone was consistently bad. Faced with an increasingly disheartened electorate, “dozens of Republicans were threatening to call it quits” and join Democrats

in insisting on a firm pullout date. Then President Bush made “an impassioned plea.” Wait until September, he urged, so we can give the brilliant new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, a

chance to turn things around with the “surge” of 30,000 additional troops. “And slowly, slowly began a trickle of good news: fewer car and suicide bombings here, fewer violent civilian

deaths there.” When Petraeus testified to these and other positive developments before Congress last week, the defeatist Democrats who said Iraq was already lost were proved wrong. “The war

is in a better place” now, and so are the loyal Republicans who are joining Bush in insisting on success, even if it takes many years. But the war is not, in fact, in a better place, said

Fred Kaplan in Slate.com. Questionable statistics showing a reduction in the carnage don’t change the fact that Iraq’s Shiite leaders have no interest in reconciling with the Sunnis. Anyone

with open eyes can see that Iraq is well along in the process of “fissuring into at least three separate countries.” Yet following Petraeus’ testimony, in a speech “rife with evasion and

fantasy,” Bush tried to portray Iraq as a unified ally under assault by foreign terrorists. In reality, Iraq is being destroyed from within by its own “sectarian clashes,” with al Qaida in

Iraq responsible for only 5 percent of the daily, gruesome attacks. SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

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From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. In another flight of fancy, said Dan Froomkin in

TheWashingtonPost.com, Bush claimed that he was planning to withdraw thousands of troops over the next year because of battlefield successes. “Actually, he has no choice.” Many of the troops

in Iraq are exhausted, disgusted, and overdue to come home, and the Pentagon has openly admitted that it can’t sustain a force of 160,000 there much longer. Even Bush has stopped trying to

sell the greatest fantasy of all—that Iraq can serve as “a model of democracy in the Arab world,” said Jim Hoagland in _The Washington Post_. In his nationally televised speech, Bush argued

that we must stay in Iraq to avert civil war, genocide, and regional chaos. Our strategic rationale for fighting this war, in other words, has changed “from hope to fear.” Not so, said

Frederick W. Kagan and William Kristol in _The Weekly Standard_. In Anbar province, the Sunnis have turned on the al Qaida fighters who were terrorizing them, and have helped U.S. forces

kill and capture hundreds of these dangerous fanatics. “Al Qaida in Iraq has gone from near-ascendancy in 2006 to near-collapse in 2007.” Thanks to the surge, Shiite militias and death

squads have also been defanged. The progress in Iraq is real, and Bush and Petraeus are certainly offering more hope than the Democrats, who have no plan and are openly rooting for American

defeat. Progress or not, said Ronald Brownstein in the _Los Angeles Times_, Bush may cede the final decisions about Iraq to a Democrat. The public remains unhappy about the lack of political

progress in Iraq, as well as “the unremitting tide of civilian and military casualties.” GOP strategists are deeply worried that when voters go to the polls in the 2008 elections, the U.S.

will be fighting essentially the same war that helped prompt 2006’s GOP disaster. In effect, Bush “has virtually dared voters to view the next election as a referendum on the war.” That’s a

dare that Republicans may come to bitterly regret. A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com