JL

A Hawk Among Democrats:

Joe Lieberman, who should have been forwarded as last year's candidate for President from the Democratic primaries, has a piece in Opinion Journal. The occasion is his return from his fourth trip to Iraq. He reports military and economic progress in extraordinary quantities, and praises our soldiers and Marines.

And then, he gets around to the question that has been baffling me these last several weeks:

Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America's bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.

I still don't understand where the sudden calls for withdrawal are coming from. Now, of any point since the fall of Baghdad to the Coalition, is surely the time for robust confidence. What is the cause for the decline of confidence? It doesn't make any sense.