Tell the Democrats we're running out of people to which we can surrender.

Abu Khalaf (a pseudonym) was the top al Qaeda leader in Mosul, al Qaeda's last reputed stronghold in Iraq, until American soldiers shot him full of holes. Further south, al Sadr's Madhi Army may be falling apart, with perhaps as few as 150 military members.

So, will someone please bring me up to speed on Barack Obama's position this hour? Is he still insisting that it is 2006 in Iraq, that the situation is untenable, and that the best thing we can do is withdraw all our forces in an expensive, resource-abandoning retreat that many experts suspect could trigger a regional war that makes today's gas prices look like a bargain and trigger a worldwide depression?

I ask, because it's rather difficult to keep up with his positions these days as he continues to throw his principles, campaign promises, friends, mentors, and supporters under the proverbial bus to bow at the alter of political expediency.

I kid, of course.

I don't seriously think Obama will change his position on Iraq being lost, as that is the only viable issue of his campaign once you eliminate his Carteresque economic schemes, head-in-the-sand energy policy, his Clintonian heathcare plan, and his beautifully empty platitudes. What he and his allies will try to do is attempt to redefine losing and winning, and try to cast obvious developing successes as defeats. If he can't successfully redefine success into failure, Barack Obama is finished as a viable candidate.

Update: Dr. Krauthammer is equally unimpressed with Obama's constantly shifting positions, and the media's unwillingness to challenge him.

It's an odd relationship Obama has with journalists. He treats them with the arrogant disdain of last night's 2:00 AM hookup, and still they pine over him, happily used, as they're shown the door.

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You won't easily find it on Fox News or CNN or Google News, but somewhere, between the shocking news that Don Imus might have a race-relations problem and the ground-breaking development that Palestinians have engaged in self-defeating random violence, most of us seemed to miss that a dream is more than halfway towards completion.

Al Anbar province in Iraq, once described as all but lost, will become the tenth Iraqi province handed over to Iraqi government control:

The U.S. military will transfer control of security in Anbar Province to Iraqi forces this week, the governor of the region said Monday, a remarkable turnaround given that the region was considered lost to insurgents less than two years ago.

Anbar will be the 10th of 18 provinces in Iraq to return security matters to Iraqi control since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, but it will be the first Sunni Arab region to do so.

Mamun Sami Rasheed, governor of Anbar Province, said the handover ceremony would take place Saturday. "We have been dreaming of this event since 2003," he said.

With ten provinces down and eight to go, we are passing a milestone of sorts. More than half of the country will be under the control of a democratically-elected Iraqi government, the first freely-elected Arab government in modern history. You would think that Democrats would be thrilled at this step towards freedom, as the turnover also means we are one small step closer to a withdrawal from Iraq, which they claim to be their goal.

Barack Obama isn't trumpeting the good news, however. Left-leaning blogs also appear to be silent on the issue, or nearly so, if Memeorandum is a guide. Instead, liberal bloggers there seem more interested in reacting to Glenn Greenwald's latest long-winded rant about FISA (while ignoring Greenwald's own history of wiretapping, of course).

Al Anbar? It doesn't seem to exist.

With ever passing day that Iraq inches towards success or takes a dramatic leap, it becomes ever more apparent that many Democrats in this country, be they members of the news media, the new media, elected officials, or the activist left, don't just want the United States out of Iraq. They want us cast out or withdrawn in defeat.

The al Anbar handover is symbolic in nature as well as practical, and good news for two Democratic nations. Sadly Democratic leaders cannot join in sharing the good news, because what is good for the United States and what is good for the citizens of Iraq is not good for Harry Reid, or Nancy Pelosi, or Barack Obama.

How sad this day must be for Democrats that are more loyal to their nation than the spite-based political ideology of their fellow travelers.

Update: Peter Wehner, writing at NRO's The Corner, concludes:

Iraq has gone from broken to fragile and slowly mending. Even now, though, leading Democrats seem wholly uninterested in the outcome in Iraq; all they care about is withdrawing American troops. It is a commitment they hold with ideological and theological intensity – and if they are ever allowed to act on their convictions, misery and death and defeat would follow.

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It has been fascinating—and often more than a little infuriating—to watch the anti-Administration wing of the anti-war movement over the past year.

I'd like to first make that distinction clear: there are those who are against the concept of warfare to resolve conflicts, and those that are against this war in specific because they have an acute loathing for their domestic political opposition, led by the current President. Make no mistake: so many of those who presently claim to be anti-war now would change their position on military intervention in an heartbeat if it meant intervening in Darfur or (_fill_in_the_blank_), if it satisfied their political desires and could be painted as a "humanitarian" mission.

Those politically-motivated progressives that see anti-war sentiment as little more than a way to grab power via the ballot box have been most aggravating and occasionally amusing. They saw that an unpopular and protracted war was a way to market themselves to pick up seats in Congress in 2004 and 2006, and hoped perhaps they could ride anti-war sentiment to the White House in 2008.

They rallied behind an eloquent dove of a candidate who has repeatedly promised America to withdrawal U.S. forces on a rigid 16-month timetable, regardless of condition on the ground or the effect it would have on the Iraqi people or on the stability of the region.

That timetable was predicated upon conditions on the ground in Iraq in 2006, when violence was spiraling out of control, and it seemed all but assured that Iraq would become a failed state. Obviously, a lot has changed in the time since Barack Obama predicated his campaign on achieving defeat, and in the past year in particular.

Violence dropped as U.S. and Iraqi forces moved off-base and into the communities, and as the communities themselves began rejecting insurgents, terrorists, gangs, and rogue militias. The Iraqi Parliament, once almost as ineffective as our current Congress, has passed important reconciliation legislation, including an amnesty law that has already led to hundreds of captured insurgents, including Associated Press personnel, to be set free.

Though leading Democrats like Harry Reid still insist that the war is lost, and the Speaker of the House insists that any progress must be due to Iran's moderating influence (and not the success of American and Iraqi forces in killing those carrying out those "moderating Iranian influences" it has become obvious to most of the world that the Iraqi experiment just might work and is well worth pursuing.

Austin Bay noted this morning that freshman Senator Hopeandchange may be trying to distance himself from his adopted policy of purposeful defeat (h/t: Instapundit):

Obama still touts his pull-out — sort of, occasionally, okay, less occasionally. Obama, like his cohort of supporters, is politically committed to defeat. Obama will now rely on rhetoric to assauge the DailyKos-crowd and obscure his shift on Iraq. He will change his position– and Samantha Power prepared the way several months ago in her ill-fated BBC interview this past spring. Obama thinks he can get away with it: he just backed out of public financing.

The NY Times on the deal before the vote. And Fox.

The real rubes in this election wonÂ’t be the rural Midwesterners Obama slandered, the ones who cling to their guns and religon. It will be the gray-haired profs with ponytails, clinging to their cannabis and liturgy of defeat.

When Obama quietly slinks aways from his signature issue and the anti-Bush wing of the anti-war movement loses their defeat-at-any-cost pledgemaster, what will become of the anti-war progressive fringe?

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Over at The Donovan, proof that this generation of military leaders is learning from mistakes made in the past.

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Via email from a trusted source, a VOI account. It looks like al Sadr is going to continue his Iranian-backed insurrection against the Iraqi government:

The anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr on Friday expressed intention to authorize setting up "cells
to resist the occupation", head of the political bureau of Sadr's
Movement said.

"The declaration by Sayyed Muqtada al-Sadr to form cells to resist the
occupation comes in full conformity with the approach of the
Sadrists," Sheikh Liwa Semaysam told Aswat al-Iraq- Voices of Iraq-
(VOI) on the phone.

The key Sadrist leader added that these cells will "have a written
authorization by Sayyed Muqtada al-Sadr to carry out their task, on
the condition that arms will only be in their hands for use against
the occupier and none else."

Sheikh Semaysam, a close aide of Sadr, provided no further details.

If true—and apparently, it is—al Sadr is attempting to split and sanction a military wing off of the Madhi Army and Iranian "Special groups" to continue insurgent operations, while making at least a face-value attempt to demilitarize the organization.

Intresting, isn't it?

Iran tried to infiltrate Iraqi government at all levels, along with militia groups and criminal gangs. Obviously, as PM Maliki's clearing out of Sadrists from Baghdad to Basra proved, the government route has failed, and the militia route is on the ropes.

As a result, al Sadr is apparently attempting to craft an Iraqi Hezbollah, entrenching his group socially as an Iranian-supported shadow government with it's own insurgent military wing. Iraq's security forces and government are far less fractured than those in Lebanon, so it seems unlikely that al Sadr's hopes will come to fruition, but the development does raise an interesting question, namely: is this the best Iran has left?

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Over at Hot Air this morning, Ed Morrissey points to an article in the Weekly Standard about Barack Obama's opposition to the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization:

These designations are more than just rhetorical; labeling the IRGC as a terrorist organization brings to bear a range of powerful sanctions that crack down on its ability to work in the global financial system.

The proximate cause of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment was a growing dossier of evidence from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, documenting the IRGC's role in financing, training, arming, and directing extremists in Iraq responsible for the murder of hundreds of American and Iraqi soldiers and civilians.

Of course, that's not the full extent of the IRGC's malign influence. The group is an acknowledged supporter of terror (a fact even Senator Obama concedes), training, financing and arming Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and most recently, the Taliban. At home in Iran, the IRGC now dominates the regime, with 9 out of 21 seats in the Ahmadinejad cabinet held by former IRGC and IRGC-affiliated officials. The IRGC is also a vital player in Iran's licit and illicit economies, and dominates important sectors like construction.

Needless to say, the Kyl-Lieberman amendment won broad support in the Senate, passing 76-22. Senator Hillary Clinton voted for it, as did Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senator Chuck Schumer, and Senator Dick Durbin.

Senator Obama, however, was one of a handful of senators who opposed the amendment--which had aroused the ire of the left-wing blogosphere. In the frenzied minds of DailyKos and Moveon.org, Kyl-Lieberman--or "Lieberman-Kyl," as they preferred to call it--was nothing less than a stealth declaration of war on Iran.

So if the National Journal's Most Liberal Senator is still taking marching orders from Kossacks and the "General Betray Us" radicals of Moveon.org, where, precisely, is Obama's claimed but never seen bipartisanship? It doesn't exist. It never has.

As Ed astutely notes:

There are only two reasons to oppose the application of sanctions on Iran. Either one wants to go to war and skip all of the other options, or doesn't believe Iran to be a threat and a sponsor of terror. Into which group should we put Barack Obama?

Obama, who resolutely refuses to acknowledge changing fortunes in Iraq (the more than year-long string of successes there are not changes he can believe in), obviously takes the later, "see no evil" view.

Pro-Palestinian Obama will try to gloss over his record (such as the Kyl-Lieberman vote) and his past associations today as he addresses AIPAC. Perhaps someone in the audience will ask Obama why he allowed a pair of grants totaling $75,000 to go to the Arab-American Action Network, a group that calls the establishment of Israel as a "catastrophe," while director of the ultra-liberal Woods Fund.

Barack Obama supports Israel the way R. Kelly supports Girl Scouts. It's time someone calls him on it.

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A stunning prediction from Michael Yon:

One of the biggest problems with the Iraq War is that politics has frequently triumphed over truth. For instance, we went into Iraq with shoddy intelligence (at best), no reconstruction plan, and perhaps half as many troops as were required. We refused to admit that an insurgency was growing, until the country collapsed into anarchy and civil war. Now the truth is that Iraq is showing real progress on many fronts: Al Qaeda is being defeated and violence is down and continuing to decrease. As a result, the militias have lost their reason for existence and are getting beaten back or co-opted. Shia, Sunni and Kurds are coming together -- although with various stresses -- under the national government. If progress continues at this rate, it is very possible that before 2008 is out, we can finally say "the war has ended."

This comes as part of Yon's offer to tour Iraq with U.S. Senators—including the Presidential candidates—so that they can make informed decisions regarding the progress of the conflict.

If Yon is accurate, then Democrats (including Barack Obama) who continue to insist that the war is lost are going to lose all of their credibility in coming months. They will of course try to pivot, and make up some excuse to take credit for the success of operations in Iraq if such a situation develops.

History will not remember pro-defeat politicians or activists kindly.

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