Democrats see 'results' in Iraq

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Top Senate Democrats have started to acknowledge progress in Iraq, with the chairman of the Armed Services Committee yesterday saying the U.S. troop surge is producing "measurable results."

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan highlighted improved security in Baghdad and al Qaeda losses in Anbar province as examples of success — a shift for Democrats who have mainly discounted or ignored advances on the battlefield for weeks.

"The military aspects of President Bush's new strategy in Iraq ... appear to have produced some credible and positive results," Mr. Levin said in a joint statement with Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican, after a two-day visit last week to Iraq.

Mr. Levin joins a growing chorus of Democrats — including 2008 presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois — who say the troop surge has produced benefits, but who also bemoan failures of the fledgling Iraqi government they have repeatedly criticized for taking an August vacation.

The Democrats' reframing of the war debate helps them avoid criticism for naysaying U.S. military achievements while still advocating a speedy pullout from what they say is a civil war the Iraqi government cannot quell.

"It's working," Mrs. Clinton said of the troop surge yesterday in a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Kansas City, Mo., a group at odds with her votes for a pullout and against emergency troop funding.

But Mrs. Clinton told the roughly 5,000 veterans that the new strategy came "too late" in the four-year-old war and it is time to bring U.S. troops home.

"I do not think the Iraqis are ready to do what they have to do for themselves yet," she said. "I think it is unacceptable for our troops to be caught in the crossfire of a sectarian civil war while the Iraqi government is on vacation."

The Bush administration said Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders are meeting — despite the parliament's recess — in pursuit of political accommodations acceptable to the Kurds, the ruling Shi'ites, the majority population and the Sunnis who were displaced from power in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

"We believe that Prime Minister Maliki and the Presidency Council will be able to get this important work done, work that is being done on the local level where we see bottom-up reconciliation taking hold," said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.