General Petraeus’ Report Is About Far More Than Election Year Politics

...the burgeoning Iraqi government is making important strides of its own: its Ministry of Defense has assembled 134 army combat, infrastructure, and special operations battalions, the national government is sharing vital oil revenues with Iraqi provinces, and the Iraqi parliament has passed pension, de-Baathification reform, amnesty, and budget laws in just the last few months alone. In fact, the much-maligned Iraqi government has met 12 out of the original 18 benchmarks set for it and made substantial progress toward meeting five more. I often jokingly say that this gives the Iraqi parliament a better track record than the U.S. Congress, but as it turns out, it’s really not a joke. There is genuine validity to that assertion...

As a result of these indisputable steps forward, more than 20,000 of our troops are coming home. But more importantly, they are returning home after success – not defeat.

That is, after all, where the difference lies between those who have stood behind the Petraeus plan and those who have sought to undermine it every step of the way. Indeed, congressional Democrats and their allies in the anti-war Left have devised strategy after strategy to derail our efforts in Iraq, but they have failed each time, allowing our troops to achieve the gains over the past year that have made victory in Iraq much more attainable. This week, they’re bound to try once again, however, with all signs indicating that they will take direct aim at General Petraeus, even as his strategy is yielding success in Iraq, and make the convoluted argument that Iraq is to blame for our recent economic downturn...

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[last time around all we heard was political-benchmarks-political-benchmarks-political-benchmarks... Yesterday? No mention of political benchmarks by any Democrat. Now it's all about the cost.

about that cost:
defense spending -- even with war costs factored in -- is well below the historical average -- Today we’re spending less than 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense. That’s only 1 percentage point higher than we were spending at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. And it’s still below the 6.2 percent of GDP we were shelling out for defense during the waning years of the Cold War in the 1980s -- and significantly less than the 9.5 percent we spent in the late 1960s, duringthe Vietnam War. READ MORE