By: E&P Staff While most commentators have judged the message on Iraq from the midterm election results is to seek a pull back -- and even Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has pretty much thrown in the towel on the war -- the Wall Street Journal offered today a quite different spin. It still favors doing "whatever it takes to win in Iraq."
Exit polls, among other surveys, showed that roughly 6 in 10 voters want the U.S. to start withdrawing some or all troops from Iraq immediately.
But the Journal, in its featured opinion piece online, declares that the victorious Democrats "could do themselves and the country much good by working with Mr. Bush on a strategy toward achieving victory in Iraq as well as against al Qaeda. This means more than bromides about a 'phased withdrawal' of troops next year, which won't encourage Iraq's militias to disarm; and it means more than Mr. Murtha's 'redeployment' to Okinawa or somewhere else where the world would see that the U.S. has given up on Iraq.
"The Democrats could be most constructive by taking up the call of Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain to do whatever it takes to win in Iraq. If this means more troops, Iraqi or American, they should call for them. And if it means spending more to build a larger American military in this era of the global terrorist threat, they should do that too. This would not sit well with many on the antiwar left, but then Ned Lamont lost to Mr. Lieberman once their contest moved to an electorate larger than the Democratic primaries."
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