Charles Kesler on Iraq and the Neoconservatives

"As its new counterinsurgency strategy takes hold, the Bush Administration regards the war in Iraq with guarded optimism, pointing to encouraging signs that the "surge" is working or at least beginning to work. Baghdad appears to have pulled back from the edge of civil war. In Al Anbar province, local tribesmen have turned away from al-Qaeda and other foreign jihadists, and staked their future, at least temporarily, on cooperation with the Americans and the elected Iraqi government. The new Iraqi military and police forces are more numerous and better trained than ever, and suffer no shortage of recruits despite their predictable decimation by suicide bombers.

Even as the military tide in Iraq may be turning, however, political support in America for the war has reached new lows. Only two years after a GOP triumph in which the party renewed, indeed augmented, its control of the presidency, the House of Representatives, and the Senate, the voters in 2006 changed course, putting the Democratic Party back in charge of both houses of Congress for the first time in a dozen years. Although there were many reasons for the debacle, the public's dissatisfaction with the war, and with President Bush's leadership of it, loomed largest. His approval ratings have plunged to Nixonian depths, and his administration's reputation for competence now rivals Jimmy Carter's...

read it all: Claremont Review of Books