the politicians in Washington are playing a high stakes game of chicken -- one whose outcome will change the balance of power and have a profound effect on the 2008 presidential elections.

It's a dynamic I know well. In 1995, I was one of the political consultants who advised President Clinton during the government shutdown, which was brought on by another clash between another assertive Congress and an equally determined president. Then as now, the stakes were high. Had we failed, Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich would have become America's de facto prime minister. Instead, Clinton's presidency was restored.

This time, if Democrats insist on their policy and public sentiment rallies behind them, the GOP collapse on national security issues will be complete. If, however, the public blames Democrats for risking troops in Iraq, congressional Democrats will have committed a political blunder nearly as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq itself. So who should swerve first? The lessons of 1995 suggest that Democrats today are on the verge of a major mistake....
Democrats should not be misled by polls showing that most Americans support the idea of cutting off funding for the war unless benchmarks of success are reached. Of course they do, in the abstract. But Bush's counterargument -- that Democrats are prepared to undermine troops in the field -- will be a powerful one, in part because it is far more concrete than Democrats' complex, poll-tested plan.

In short, Democrats would do well to compromise. If that means accepting a "clean" supplemental funding bill, so be it. While Democrats must continue to criticize the prosecution of the war and the Bush administration's failure to promote political reconciliation, they should also recognize that the public has not yet elected a new commander in chief.

The 2008 election is the Democrats' to lose. Attempting to usurp the powers of the commander of the chief -- or risking the charge that Democrats have abandoned troops in the field -- is one of the few ways the party could jeopardize its seemingly impregnable position. The best chance to end the war is to make sure the next president is a Democrat.

America's media -- Seattle's daily newspapers included -- failed its citizens in the run-up to the Iraq war, reporting lies as fact and regurgitating the government's party line almost completely devoid of skepticism. The journalist's duty to cut through the fog on behalf of this country's citizens comes with the press pass. Bill Moyers crystallizes that argument beautifully in Wednesday night's "Buying the War," a harsh look at the damaging manipulation of our nation's media in the months between 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq war. As medicinal as it is sobering, this is the kind of work that should be shown to journalism students as a warning about how dangerous a cowed press can be to democracy's health.

Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.

In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks — all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups — who were now competing to secure his friendship.

In Baghdad’s Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi units arrived.

We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark.

But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq).

In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Army’s highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab.

In the past, few Iraqi units could do more than provide a few “jundis” (soldiers) to put a thin Iraqi face on largely American operations. Today, in only a few sectors did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi formations were useless — something that was the rule, not the exception, on a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005.

The additional American military formations brought in as part of the surge, General Petraeus’s determination to hold areas until they are truly secure before redeploying units, and the increasing competence of the Iraqis has had another critical effect: no more whack-a-mole, with insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave.

In war, sometimes it’s important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas). Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body armor.

Another surprise was how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid programs often built white elephants.

In some places where we have failed to provide the civilian manpower to fill out the reconstruction teams, the surge has still allowed the military to fashion its own advisory groups from battalion, brigade and division staffs. We talked to dozens of military officers who before the war had known little about governance or business but were now ably immersing themselves in projects to provide the average Iraqi with a decent life.

Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local governments. But more must be done. For example, the Iraqi National Police, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, remain mostly a disaster. In response, many towns and neighborhoods are standing up local police forces, which generally prove more effective, less corrupt and less sectarian. The coalition has to force the warlords in Baghdad to allow the creation of neutral security forces beyond their control.

In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation — or at least accommodation — are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.

“Recently [February, for the record - mith], the Director of National Intelligence told Congress that the next Al Qaeda attack on the United States ‘most likely would be planned and come out of the [Al Qaeda] leadership in Pakistan.’ More than five years after 9/11, it is disappointing that the Bush Administration has failed to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahari, failed to prevent new Al Qaeda cells from emerging in dozens of countries, and failed to win the hearts and minds of millions around the world. It is time for a new, more effective strategy, and Democrats are determined to see that change occurs.”

"Here's their record," he said. "Five years after Osama bin Laden murdered 3,000 people, he's still on the loose in northwest Pakistan plotting to kill our people.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean said to a group in Washington, “Osama bin Laden is still running around in northwest Pakistan, evidently able to convince people they ought to blow up American airplanes. And we are bogged down spending half a trillion dollars in Iraq, which could be used to do the things the Democratic Party and the 9/11 Commission recommended, which is to make our airports, our nuclear power plants and our train stations safe here at home."

Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat, told Fox, "the tape reminds us that four years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden is still at large, the subject of the largest manhunt in history, and we haven't been able to find him. Part of the reason is because we've been bogged down in Iraq."

Harman, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said it's also a reminder that al Qaeda and "copycat organizations" present threats around the world.

"Our challenge is to project America in such a way that we diminish this call to arms," she said. "Our values have to be out there. We have to govern by the rule of law. We can't send messages that make us look as bad as those who would attack us."

Mr. Waxman wrote that Mr. Krongard’s detractors have described “a dysfunctional office environment” in which he routinely bullies and berates employees and shows contempt for the work of career professionals. As a result, turnover has been so high that the inspector general’s office has been severely compromised, Mr. Waxman wrote.

“Your strong affinity with State Department leadership and your partisan political ties have led you to halt investigations, censor reports and refuse to cooperate with law enforcement agencies,” Mr. Waxman wrote, citing the accounts of disgruntled present and former employees. The assertions in Mr. Waxman’s letter included these:

¶That while the State Department had spent more than $3.6 billion on contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, “you refused to send any investigators to those countries to pursue investigations into wasteful spending or procurement fraud and have concluded no fraud investigations relating to the contracts.”

¶That Mr. Krongard had prevented his investigators from cooperating with a Justice Department investigation into waste, fraud and abuse involving the new United States Embassy in Baghdad, “and followed highly irregular procedures in exonerating the prime contractor, First Kuwaiti Trading Co., of charges of labor trafficking.”

¶That he had barred his investigators from seizing evidence that they believed would have implicated a major State Department contractor in procurement fraud in Afghanistan.

Somewhere in Western Washington resides a former Blackwater contractor who might under normal circumstances be on trial for the high-profile killing of an Iraqi in Baghdad's Green Zone. But federal officials say he's not in custody. They barely acknowledge his existence, let alone release his name or discuss the status of the investigation.