With the incoming Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi, backing Rep. John “Redeploy From Iraq to Okinawa” Murtha to be House majority leader, evidence is growing that the Democrats are going to try to address the Battle of Iraq earlier rather than later in the 110th Congress. With one of the nation’s leading conservative columnists, George Will, calling Iraq “arguably the worst foreign-policy disaster in U.S. history,” it looks like Iraq is going to be flyspecked from many angles. Yesterday, President Bush met with members of the Iraq Study Group he has appointed to take a fresh look at the issue. We welcome all the scrutiny. While the Congress proved in 1975 that it can be dangerous, the victory camp has a strong case to make and could yet come out of this process the winner.

Our GIs, for starters, have made enormous achievements in Iraq. A wicked dictator, Saddam Hussein, has been removed from power, tried by his countrymen for his crimes, and sentenced to the gallows. And the Iraqi people have astonished the doubters by voting three times in their first free elections in generations. In January 2005, 8 million of them voted for a temporary parliament.* In October 2005, about 9.8 million Iraqis voted in a referendum and by an overwhelming margin approved a new constitution. In December 2005, nearly 12 million Iraqis voted for parliament. Iraq now has a free press and the beginnings of a capitalist economy, where little more than three years ago both the press and commerce had been controlled by Saddam’s Baathist regime.