'The Audacity of Victory'

Now that the war in Iraq is won, (though sensitivity for world feelings forbids us from ever declaring it), I wonder how long it will take before the media transmogrifies the universally-hated “Bush’s war” into “Obama’s victorious strategy in Iraq”?

Steve Schippert at The Tank at National Review Online (archived on November 14) has this to say about “The Audacity of Victory: How To End a War”:

Let's get right to the heart of the matter. Barack Obama said famously, "I am the only major candidate who has opposed this war from the beginning. And as president, I will end it." What he really meant was "I will disengage U.S. forces from it." An enemy not yet defeated will have decidedly chosen not to "end it," and therefore likely claimed an abandoned victory for their own.

In 2004, President Bush was the only major candidate who supported the war. And as president, he won it. He might get a footnote in the immediate contemporary history to be written in the coming months and years, while Obama will be awarded full credit for withdrawing U.S. forces — now that, as Michael Yon describes to Glenn Reynolds via phone from Iraq, in "the 10th Mountain Division . . . about half of the guys I'm with haven't fired their weapons on this tour and they've been here eight months."

Please read the rest of it here.