Victory in Iraq was all but declared earlier this year.

Both major candidates have claimed success for the Petraeus surge, and each have proposed policy adjustments for the future of Iraq and global security. Even this week, the Associated Press conceded a major Bush administration argument on the conflict, that success in Iraq would stablize the Mideast and promote American interests in the region. Even American public opinion sees the administration’s counterinsurgency strategy as improving security in Iraq, and making it possible for the eventual drawdown of American forces.

If we might expect policy disagreements between the right and left in American politics, it should be on the pace and scope of the forthcoming troop withdrawal, or one might think.

Not so for the folks at Firedoglake, who seem stuck in 2003, up in arms over the long-ago controversy surrounding the American decision to topple the Baghdad regime in furtherance of over a dozen U.N. resolutions finding Iraq to be in material breach of its disarmament commitments.

But there’s more at issue tonight, for Firedoglake is essentially calling for the death of the United States as the Imperial hegemon, in its essay, “It is in Blood That Empires, Like Humans, Are Born, It is in Blood That They Die“:

War … is hell. This isn’t news, everyone knows it. But as with most of what everyone “knows” they don’t really get it, because most people don’t get things that have never effected them or people they love. And if you’re in Congress, well, with very few exceptions, no one you care about is going to fight, no one you know is going to risk their life and maybe even get captured and tortured. The same is true of most people serving in the administration….

And so we come back to the heart of the war. We rarely talk about it anymore, but it’s simple enough. All those people who supported the war, and most especially all those who voted for it, bear the moral responsibility for the results of the war. At least 100,000 dead Iraqis (and probably closer to a million). 4,000 and rising dead US soldiers. Rape. Murder. Torture. Orphans who got to watch their parents being killed. Husbands who saw their wives die, or wives who watched their husbands gunned down or blown into bloody carrion. Families who have buried multiple children.

All because members of Congress didn’t care and because they were gutless. Because they though [sic] to themselves “I might have to face attack ads if I vote against this war.” Can you think of anything more weak, anything more pathetically evil, than to care more about your reelection than about thousands dying? Than about the certainty that from your vote will come rape and torture and murder?

And can you think of anything more pathetic, more redolent of bad judgment than to say “but I didn’t know. I trusted George Bush?”

As far as I am concerned most of Congress doesn’t just have blood on their hands, they are in it up to their chins. Their gutlessness, cupidity and selfishness is such that most of them, in a just world, would be preparing their defenses for a Nuremburg trial. They attacked a country which had not attacked the US, based on lies that were debunked at the time, for petty personal reasons of political ambition or cowardice.

We all know that won’t happen, but what I will tell you is this. Without the Iraq war, the financial crisis happening right now either wouldn’t be, or would be much less harsh. It is quite likely that Iraq is the last mistake of the American century and marks the end of America as a superpower.

Where to begin?

Well, for one thing, international relations scholars document a current sustained American preponderance in the international system, and as stressful as Iraq has been, the U.S. is not at risk of losing is status as the world’s sole superpower. Who are the peer competitors likely to replace U.S. leadership of the world system? China? Russia. The European Union? Hardly… If we go down, they’ll go down with us, as international interdependence creates overlapping sensitivities and vulnerabilties to global crises and shocks.

But, frankly, all this is just grist for the larger attack on the moral legitimacy of the United States altogether. Firedoglake represents classic far-left anti-Americanism, and the project here is to continue the push for war crimes proceedings upon the possible accession to power of a Barack Obama administration. Ultimately, though, the goal is the destruction of the United States itself, which is alleged as racist and oppressive to the core, an irredeemable abomination in the world of nations.

Here’s Firedoglake’s conclusion:

American hegemony rose out of the ashes of WWII. World War II was an unprovoked war. Germany attacked those that did not threaten it. At Nuremburg Americans hung Nazis who had not been involved in the Holocaust, for no crime other than unprovoked war, declaring that it was a capital offense. Out of that war, and out of Nuremburg, America was born as the leader of the free world. Not just the mightiest, but the nation that said “never again”.

It is fitting then that an unprovoked war is what is bringing an end to America’s leadership of the free world, to its economic and military hegemony. Having done what it once condemned, having proven unwilling or unable to correct itself, America has reaped what it sowed….

It is in blood that empires, like humans, are born.

It is in blood that they die.

Notice the obligatory moral equivalence between Hitler’s Germany and Bush’s America.

Readers should have no doubts: The ideas expressed here are identical to those expressed by William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, tenured-radicals who sought death and destruction for American institutions during the Vietnam era. Ayers has said of America, “What a country … It makes me want to puke.”

Firedoglake, founded by Jane Hamsher, is a leading online fundraising and advocacy blog for the hardline radical left. Hamsher’s Blue America has been a central vehicle for netroots mobilization over the last few election cycles, and the organization has been central to Barack Obama’s fundraising success this year.

When Firedoglake announces that American hegemony will die in the blood of empires, know that these same people, who routinely spout this nihilism mayhem, have raised millions to install in the White House a Marxist-trained Chicago community organizer with ties to black liberation theology and unrepentant Weather Underground terrorists.

~crossposted at American Power

As a rule, I don’t use sources from the Associated Press (for obvious reasons), but their article on Iraq’s role in stabilizing American power in the Middle East is noteworthy, “Stable Iraq Could Influence Mideast” (alternative link here):

Iraq is likely to play a significant role in America’s Middle East policy for decades — even as the Pentagon scales down military operations here and ramps them up in Afghanistan.

The Middle East has long confounded forecasters, and the rosy predictions from the Bush administration that Iraq would emerge as a beacon of Western-style democracy in the Arab world have been long discredited.

However unlikely it may seem today, a relatively stable Iraq would have all the cards necessary to emerge as a major player in the Persian Gulf, where Saudi Arabia and Iran are competing for leadership.

Jules Crittenden’s blown away, frankly, at AP’s confirmation of the basic neoconservative argument on Iraq all along:

The news agency that more terrorists prefer you’ll recall was rather late to the surge table, if not nearly as fashionably late as Obama. The Associated Press and the scribbler of this particular analysis, Robert H. Reid, were still neck deep in body counts and failure-mongering when al-Qaeda was out of Anbar and on the run in Diyala in mid-2007. AP’s Baghdad bureauistas were asiduously scribbling everything they could to avoid or obscure the terrible truth of the surge’s growing success. But despite its shortcomings, Reid’s latest analysis does a relatively good job of laying out our vital interests in Iraq.

I’ll update when we see the terrorist-enabling Newshoggers cover this story - it’s going to be tough to clinch the argument that the Bush administration “paid for” this narrative.

Last Sunday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich offered a compelling conservative critique to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s Wall Street rescue plan. According to Gingrich, “this gigantic power shift to Washington and this avalanche of taxpayer money is being proposed by a Republican administration, [and] the normal conservative voices have been silent or confused.”

Not all conservatives were silent nor confused, however. The day after Gingrich spoke out, Michelle Malkin asked, “Will the real fiscal conservatives please stand up?”

In the comments here, at some of my posts on the bailout, I’ve seen considerable conservative skepticism and outrage at the enormity of Washington’s financial rescue activities over the last few weeks. As readers may recall, I’ve mostly just reported on the developments, without advocating one way or the other (the exception being my post on the left-wing protests against the administration in New York and Washington). I have, of course, been amazed with the concentration of power in the Treasury Department under Secretary Paulson, and I’ve entertained the idea that the $700 billion rescue may indeed work to stablilize markets and restore confidence in the economy, helping to shift the system back toward financial recovery.

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In another sign of how unglued members of the radical left have become, prominent netroots bloggers are blaming “Bush/McCain” for today’s terrorist bombing of the U.S. embassy in Yemen.

Here’s the resident foreign policy expert at Hullabaloo:

Y’know, occasionally I catch some grief by saying I have come truly to despise Bush/McCain and their ideological cronies like Cheney, Addington, Rumsfeld, and so on.

Here’s why: Because the Bush/McCain gang is so ignorant violent, mentally disturbed and powerful, they get hundreds of thousands innocent people killed. Sheer moral hygiene makes it imperative that this country say no to four more years of the same.

Matthew Yglesias add this:

I guess I don’t have a grand point to make about this, but it’s a reminder that if you want to curb radicalism it makes more sense to focus on ways to reduce its appeal in the places where radical movements are already strong (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, etc.) rather than, say, by invading Iraq.

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