Lieberman

Senator Joe Lieberman, Democrat from Connecticut, has recently returned from his fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and he says there's progress.  From today's Opinion Journal,

Progress is visible and practical. In the Kurdish North, there is continuing security and growing prosperity. The primarily Shiite South remains largely free of terrorism, receives much more electric power and other public services than it did under Saddam, and is experiencing greater economic activity. The Sunni triangle, geographically defined by Baghdad to the east, Tikrit to the north and Ramadi to the west, is where most of the terrorist enemy attacks occur. And yet here, too, there is progress.

But he concedes it's not over and he warns,

Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America's bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.

"To seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory," he says.  He's charitable when he implies that it's "America's bipartisan leadership" who might choose defeat, but the fact is he distances himself from fellow Democrats who seem to believe defeat for the U.S. in Iraq is not a defeat for them.  Maybe it's not.