It seems to me that battle of the surge isn't being waged properly. The republicans are getting a pass on a significant bit of hypocrisy and spin -- but there's a way to fight back.
Early on, the debate over the war(s) became confused. For the most part, democrats argued that Iraq and Afghanistan were separate wars. Newspapers argued over whether they would refer to the "global war on terror" at all, and I believe one of the questions asked of democrats in the first Iowa debate posed them with that very phrase. Republicans, on the other hand, always argued that Iraq was the front of the war on terror -- and it didn't particularly matter who'd started it. (Their perversion of Jamesian pragmatism...)
But now things have shifted. The republicans want us to see Iraq as a discrete war -- a war that we're now winning. And our own rhetoric has shifted somewhat, too. In characterizing the surge as effective, but still a bad idea, we're allowing -- as Obama said in his acceptance speech -- that the real war is against a network spread across eighty countries, and it's foolish to go after them in just one.
So how to battle back against the argument that Obama was wrong on the surge? Characterize Iraq not as a war -- but as a battle. The battle of Iraq.
Wars are made up of many battles -- you can win or lose them, and the war as a whole is not necessarily determined by those outcomes. The U.S. won every battle it waged in Vietnam, and lost the war. You have to pick your battles carefully.
Iraq was not a carefully chosen battle in the war on terror. We might win that battle, but it cost too much, and didn't do anything to help us win the war. The surge was a tactic that saved us some face, but the decision to invade at all was poor strategy in light of the larger conflict. (Obama, I love to note, is the only candidate I've heard who has a grasp of the difference between tactics and strategy...)
More broadly, we can make an even bolder point. Iraq is not the front of the war on terror. THE FRONT OF THE WAR ON TERROR IS WHEREVER BIN LADEN IS.
This, I think, is a step toward diffusing an argument that McSame & Co. are trying to use for traction to creep out of their trenches...