Krauthammer: Iraqis Have Done "Nothing;" Somehow Obama Has Done Less

And here's his sarcastic list of the "nothings" they've accomplished that "cut-and-run Barry" Obama tries to pretend haven't happened:

1. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent the Iraqi army into Basra. It achieved in a few weeks what the British had failed to do in four years: take the city, drive out the Mahdi army, and seize the ports from Iranian-backed militias.
2. When Mahdi fighters rose up in support of their Basra brethren, the Iraqi army at Maliki's direction confronted them and prevailed in every town — Najaf, Karbala, Hilla, Kut, Nasiriyah, and Diwaniyah — from Basra to Baghdad.
3. Without any American ground forces, the Iraqi army entered and occupied Sadr City, the Mahdi army stronghold.
4. Maliki flew to Mosul, directing a joint Iraqi-U.S. offensive against the last redoubt of al-Qaeda, which had already been driven out of Anbar, Baghdad, and Diyala provinces.
5. The Iraqi parliament enacted a de-Baathification law, a major Democratic benchmark for political reconciliation.
6. Parliament also passed the other reconciliation benchmarks — a pension law, an amnesty law, and a provincial elections and powers law. Oil revenues are being distributed to the provinces through the annual budget.
7. With Maliki having demonstrated that he would fight not just Sunni insurgents (e.g., in Mosul) but Shiite militias (e.g., the Mahdi army), the Sunni parliamentary bloc began negotiations to join the Shiite-led government. (The final sticking point is a squabble over a sixth Cabinet position.)

You would think that the media would do more to force Obama to recognize that his view of Iraqi is frozen in time in 2006. AFP, Reuters, McClatchy, the Associated Press, etc., all have journalists in the region. Many have multiple reporters, videographers, and photographers throughout the country of Iraq itself.

At least one of those news agencies, the Associated Press, has benefited directly and publicly from the new laws passed by the Iraqi Parliament that have largely been ignored in the press. Pulitzer-winning AP photojournalist Bilal Hussein, captured with a known al Qaeda leader, was released from prison several months ago directly as a result of Iraq's new amnesty law, and not, as the news organization would have you believe, because he was found innocent.

But the media refuse to push Obama and other Democrats to admit to their failure to recognize the massive changes sweeping Iraq since the 2006 elections.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid still doggedly insists that the U.S. "surge" is a continuation of Bush's original policies, and that strategically, tactically, and politically, nothing has changed. He still shrilly insists the war is "lost" acting as if the Sunni and Shia Awakening movements, Iraqi political advancement on both domestic and foreign policy fronts, and the impressive performance of Iraqi security forces successfully executing a cascade of large-scale operations, never occurred.

Nancy Pelosi presides over the other half one of the most unaccomplished Congresses in U.S. history, with the lowest approval rates in history, currently a dismal 10.3% lower than even George W. Bush's 29% approval rating. She take a similar route as Reid, insisting that there is no progress... but said if there was, it is because of the efforts of Iran. She will not credit the American and Iraqi forces with their hard-won successes. Instead, she would give credit to those training and arming forces those fighting against the Iraqi government.

Neither Reid, nor Pelosi, nor their anti-war allies will concede progress in Iraq because they've thoroughly wedded their political futures to failure there, and have left themselves no viable escape routes. This means that Democrats have created for themselves a vicious trap, where for the good of their party, they have to pull against two democracies (the United States and Iraq), against freedom, and against peace.

They have created for themselves a hell where for their aspirations to come true, they must hope for a failed state, crippled by resurgent brutality. The must hope that recent successes change back for the worst. History may well well look back on the post-surge Democratic House and Senate of 2007-2008 as being the most anti-democratic Congress since similar Democrats (called copperheads) attempted to concede the U.S. Civil War.

Barack Obama took the lead early in attacking the Iraq War, even when he was just a state Senator in Illinois and had no access to intelligence information to base that opinion upon. He doggedly stuck to that position through the worst of Iraq's violence in 2006, riding a cry of withdrawal and defeat to prominence, first in the U.S. Senate, and then within scant months of graduating from his mediocre stint in state politics, into the Democratic Presidential race.

His strident, unwavering opposition to the war is the entirety of his appeal; without the conflict, his resume of unaccomplishments and rote university-indoctrinated progressive politics make him an entirely conventional and uninteresting urban Democratic candidate, if one admittedly better at reading a teleprompter than most.

For this reason, Barack Obama is forced to continue running on a platform of failure in Iraq. He cannot acknowledge that his position on the war has been proven wrong. To make that concession—admitting that John McCain was right to take the unpopular position of supporting the "surge" now that the situation has so radically changed in favor of success—is to admit defeat in the general election.

Instead, Barack Obama has hitched his entire political future to becoming a political Frankenstein. He combines the worst aspects of two Presidents reviled by many; Jimmy Carter's naive pacifism and horrific grasp of taxation and economics, with George W. Bush's dead-certain stubbornness, tightly-scripted and excessively-controlled (one might even say Rovian) public relations, arrogant detachment, and inflexibility.

Obama is a man wedded to a singular message, which he markets as "hope and change."

But his "hope" is reliant on a return of brutal sectarian and terrorist violence, the collapse of the first Arab democracy, and the extinguishing of freedom. His "change" entails a headlong and arbitrary retreat, regardless of what threats the ensuing security vacuum will cause in the lives of Iraqi men, women, and children just beginning to cautiously embrace a less violent, dictator-free society.

Barack Obama has staked his future on dragging two nations back into the past, into defeat. That is not a change we can accept from a man who has never shown at any point in his life that he is capable of being a leader.