The war isn't lost unless we all resign to the liberal perspective and give up.

Granted, mistakes have been made because of incompetence by key members of the Bush administration who didn't follow the best recommendations of intelligence sources and the Pentagon generals.
But the United States has enormous military, economic, and diplomatic resources, and it is not too late to turn things around, if we are resolved to winning.

For all the truth in there being huge errors in Iraq by the Bush administration, the pointless divisiveness of the Democrats has further stalled progress in Iraq, and undermined confidence in our commitment and ability to win in Iraq, by Democrats' divisive and ridiculous demands to set a date for troop withdrawal, and wanting to fund the war in 60-day increments.

As New York Times columnist David Brooks comments in THIS PBS News Hour panel discussion last Friday:

    DAVID BROOKS: But there's a psychology here that I think Nancy Pelosi and Reid have been consciously partisan. They knew they were sacrificing stuff [i.e., making it impossible to reach agreement with Republicans in the Congress and Senate and with President Bush] by being partisan. Bush has certainly been partisan.

    But the bottom line is -- and I think is sort of what you're suggesting -- is that, if you took people with a blind vote, not a party vote, and said, "Do you support the Baker-Hamilton commission?" Eighty percent of the Congress [both Democrat and Republican] would support it. "Do you support the Biden plan, some sort of soft partition?" Eighty percent [both Democrat and Republican] would support that.

    You would have that support if people were voting their conscience, but it's the psychology of the institution [i.e., the Democrats playing partisan games, just as Bush did earlier] which is preventing it.


and

    DAVID BROOKS: ... that atmosphere has been there for three years. [House and Senate Republicans] didn't want to face the last election with Iraq, but President Bush drew them to it. So I don't think there's been a gradual change.

    The other thing that's happened is the Republicans keep getting pushed back into the White House by the Democrats. What the House passed, for example, this week, which was...

    JIM LEHRER: Funding through July.

    DAVID BROOKS: ... funding through July, the Republicans think that's just terrible policy. [House Republican] Roy Blunt told me today ...if we give like a two-month window, that just gives the insurgents an incentive to kill as many people as they can over the next two months ...as a way to chase us out. We've got to have one constant stream of policy.

    So [House and Senate Republicans] don't want to be casting these votes. But the Democrats have pushed them back to the White House by adopting what is a pretty partisan way of approaching this issue.