Progress in Iraq: bad news for Democrats?

Special to the New York Times, via Michael E. O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack of the (left-favoring) Brookings Institution:

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and

the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
(New York Times)

This is not the narrative that an ideologically left-tilted mainstream media wants to tell.

War-supporting Republicans and, I hope, Iraqis can take considerable comfort in the fact that left-biased news organizations are typically more interested in telling the truth than they are in pushing their ideological and political agendas. It's just that the agenda sometimes makes it challenging for them to tell the truth effectively.

The bigger conflict, here, is for the Democratic Party, which committed itself to defeat in Iraq. Declaring the surge strategy a "failure" within just a few weeks of the full complement of surge forces deploying is just one of the better examples.

So, how does the Democratic-controlled Congress react to the changing face of the ground situation in Iraq? Do they keep pushing for a vote to start a draw-down of forces prior to General Petraeus' September report?

It's possible. After all, the Democrats moved to signal retreat after receiving reports that the Iraqi government has made little progress despite some significant gains on the "benchmarks" concerning the security situation.

The big factor here, it seems, is the public perception angle. So long as the American people are convinced that things in Iraq are deteriorating, they may forgive Democrats for their retreatist/defeatist stance.

If the public perception changes--look out.

Hat tip to Powerline.