Amen.

Bill Whittle posts (very) sporadically, but when he does, there's no one like him. I wish to hell he was in charge of the Bush administration's media division. If you don't read Eject!³, what the hell are you doing reading this blog? I know Bill posted his latest several days ago, but, shamefully, I just got around to reading it. As usual, the entire thing is absolutely worth your time, but here's the excerpt that says something I've believed for quite some time:

(A)s for the Surge, I am struck by one thought, and that is this: It seems clear now that we needed more troops in theater from Day One. But I think the spectacular success of the Surge is due less to the number of boots on the ground than it is to something far more important.

Looking back on the rise of the insurgency, it seems as if the average Iraqi did not know what to make of America. I suspect that many would have been far more supportive a long time ago, if it were not for the image of a helicopter atop a building in 1975 and a line of desperate people running for their lives. To work with Americans may have been what many wanted to do much, much sooner.

But...

When Michael Moore makes a hugely successful film praising Saddam's paradise and calling these people who bomb women and children in marketplaces "freedom fighters," and when an election turns and places into Congressional power a political party dedicated to reproducing that helicopter tableau as soon as possible... what would you do? Because if you guess wrong and the Americans leave, you will be taken out into the street in front of your family and have your head sawed off.

I think the Surge has had spectacular success not because of the additional troops so much as for the fact that when the media and the Democrats demanded we cut and run... we did not cut and run. We doubled down. When the calls for defeat and dishonor were at their loudest – sad to say a not unwarranted street rep we had made for ourselves – somehow, somehow we simply just hung on and gave them not a retreat but a charge.

Jesus Christ, but that must have gotten someone's attention. Yes, the Surge is working. But I believe it is not a surge of boots that is doing the work so much as it is a surge of hope.

Amen.

I think, too, that the average Iraqi would have been far more supportive had we not abandoned them after the 1991 Gulf War to Saddam's tender mercies.

And, I'm sorry to say, the entire pack of Democrat hopefuls for the Oval Office next year are promising Iraqis that lone helicopter on the roof again...

...with the apparent blessing of about half the population of this nation, damn us all to hell.