Urgency in language works only when that to which attention may be directed is imminent and veritable. Legislative moves — one in June, another in July — to rescind the war-making authority exercised by President Bush in Iraq were founded, ostensibly, on political acknowledgment of a public dissatisfied with news from the front. On the cusp of August and September, official and independent reports tell of an enemy breaking (there goes veritableness) and a liberal Iraqi state showing promise with continued support (followed by imminence). One, two, three, five, ten and more opponents of White House policy, most of them Democrats, are speaking very differently than they had been.
Qualification: they are trying. With repudiation of the Iraqi campaign left in a wake months or years long, Washington's more massive personalities are turning clumsily; Senator Hillary Clinton, for one, with the familiar grace of a battleship. The presidential runner and her staff aren't throwing out old speeches but reworking them, and the integration is so far mishmash.
On the offensive of General David Petraeus? Yes, agreed the senator, speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "in some areas, particularly in al Anbar province, it's working." So the mercurial terrorist can be outsmarted and, as gains accumulate, defeated strategically? Yes, but Mrs. Clinton, through her words, stepped forward in time and turned to face her audience years from now. "We're just years too late in changing our tactics. We can't ever let that happen again. We can't be fighting the last war. We have to keep preparing to fight the new war." Her answer to that didactic need was bureaucratic, rather than historic, as if a soldier ever learned how to beat an unfamiliar adversary in any way other than by engaging him. And mission fulfillment? For the troops, "I think the best way of honoring their service is by beginning to bring them home."
After proposing retreat from a campaign that looks favorable, Clinton's meditation was that foreigners "have to want to be on our side." Where the departure of American forces has allowed gangs to retake towns and villages, if there is malefaction after a President Clinton has withdrawn the military, why, the senator thought a deserted Iraqi must choose "to say nothing or maybe to tell somebody."
The balance between the hardened political left and the public is not easy. Popular opinion recognizes that it is many times preferable to have a prime minister and his parliament trying their best impression of hard-times India than a Godfather and his demented sons play-acting the reign of Joseph Stalin. In a decade, the only fact relating to Iraq mattering at all to nine-tenths of the population will be that the United States won. So Clinton, and others, want to zig and zag.