Give victory a chance!! No, uh, lets start to pull out

By Lee Russ

Wednesday, July 19, 2006 at 06:03 PM

Politics sure is weird, isn't it?  Passionate speeches on the floor, asking everybody and their brother for money, smiling all the time (unless you're one of the "attack dog" office holders), reading polls, taking polls, reading polls, taking polls....changing your passionate position.

Remember Gil Gutknecht, the Congressman from Minnesota?  He's the one who stood on the House floor during the staged "debate" on whether to set a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq and declared the need to "Let's give victory a chance" in Iraq. That was all of about a month ago.

Then on July 16, newspapers in Minnesota run an AP story about Gil Gutknecht being beatable by his Democratic challenger.

Oddly, Gutknecht returned from a visit to Iraq about the time that story ran and by July 18, we got an AP story that Gutknecht now thinks maybe we should start to withdraw from Iraq (emphasis added):

"I have to be very candid - Baghdad is a serious problem," Gutknecht, R-Minn., told reporters on a conference call. "And since it's the capital city of the country, we cannot brag that we have much progress from a security standpoint until Baghdad is secure."
...
"But there's so much left to be done," he added. "Throughout most of Iraq, electricity's on only about 12 hours a day. That's unacceptable."

Gutknecht, who met with Iraqi and U.S. officials as well as U.S. soldiers, said the country is at a "tipping point," with the next six to eight weeks key in determining its future.

"The United States can do so much to help them, but in the end, this is their country, and it's about their future," he said. "And we have been training the Iraqis, and they are stepping up, and they are leading the fight in many of the areas of the country now."

He said it would be a mistake to send more troops to secure Baghdad.

"What we need to be doing right now is starting to withdraw some of the Americans, and that will force the Iraqis to step up and take responsibility, as they have in the northern parts of the country, in the Kurdish region," Gutknecht said.
...
And I did find out that all of the information that we received sometimes from the Pentagon and from our State Department is not completely true."

Guess we've given victory in Iraq enough of a chance; now it seems it's time to give Gutknecht a chance at victory.  If that means 'fessing up that the Republican line on all that "good news" in Iraq has been just so much horsie dung, well...every man for himself on election day.