Left's Demand to “End this War” Reflects Glorification of Defeat

Frederick Kagan makes a good point, that the left's incessant demands for an Iraq withdrawal - especially after a year of dramatic political and security gains - reflects an antiwar culture that glorifies the defeat of America at war:

Losing wars is always bad. One of the major reasons for America’s current global predominance economically and politically is that America doesn’t lose wars very often. It seems likely, however, that the American people are about to be told that they have to decide to lose the Iraq war, that accepting defeat is better than trying to win, and that the consequences of defeat will be less than the costs of continuing to fight. For some, the demand to “end this war” is a reprise of the great triumph of their generation: forcing the U.S. to lose the Vietnam War and feel good about it. But even some supporters are being seduced by their own weariness of the struggle, and are being tempted to believe the unfounded defeatism — combined with the unfounded optimism about the consequences of defeat — that hyper-sophisticates have offered during every major conflict. Americans have a right to be weary of this conflict and to desire to bring it to an end. But before we choose the easier and more comfortable wrong over the harder and more distasteful right, we should examine more closely the two core assumptions that underlie the current antiwar arguments: that we must lose this war because we cannot win it at any acceptable cost, and that it will be better to lose than to continue trying to win.

The biggest criticism now, of course, is the cost of war. Not just the fiscal costs, but the costs to the homefront, the hardships of families facing "stop-loss," the repeated deployments "wearing out our men and women in uniform."

I'm listening to Hillary Clinton right now in the Senate Foreign Relations Iraq hearings, and I just see pure hypocrisy in her attacks on General Petraeus (she was for the war before she was against it).

Petreus is handling himself well, filling in the full thrust of all his recent comments, which are being twisted for the cameras to fit Senator Clinton's antiwar pandering.

Clinton's argued it would be poltically "irresponsible" to continue the deployment given the "lack of progress" we are seeing.

I'll have more analysis later, but it's like Senators Lieberman and Graham noted yesterday, our top antiwar politicians just keep raising the bar on what we need to do to be successful:

There is no question the war in Iraq – like the Cold War, World War II and every other conflict we have fought in our history – costs money. But as great as the costs of this struggle have been, so too are the dividends to our national security from a successful outcome, with a functioning, representative Iraqi government and a stabilized Middle East. The costs of abandoning Iraq to our enemies, conversely, would be enormous, not only in dollars, but in human lives and in the security and freedom of our nation.