It's good to know the Democrats are ready to take a tough stance on Iraq. They were duped by the president, and they don't care who knows it.

Now there's a position that will inspire the confidence of the American people.

The solution to their being hoodwinked, they say, is for us to pull out posthaste and leave the Iraqis to their own devices.

I'm reminded of how Kennedy/Johnson Defense Secretary Robert McNamara concluded in his sunset-years autobiography that Vietnam had been a mistake and that we probably shouldn't have fought there.

Now you tell us.

The families of 53,000 dead servicemen would have probably preferred if McNamara either would have come to that conclusion a little sooner (say 40 years ago) or if he would have had the decency to keep his trap shut.

But opposing America is the default position for liberals, so this newest round of anti-war posturing is not surprising.

Most lefties feel more comfortable going against our military. I think it makes them feel superior because they figure that military people aren't as smart or sensitive as they are.

It's their secret belief that if it weren't for soldiers, there wouldn't be any war.

We know the real truth: If there weren't any soldiers, there would only be slavery.

West Virginia's own Senator Jay Rockefeller was boasting last week that he had been undermining the war effort for longer than most of his colleagues. When pressed on Fox News Sunday about having once called Iraq an imminent threat, Rockefeller decided to establish his anti-administration bona fides once and for all.

"I took a trip by myself in January 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq, that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11," he said.

Here is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, presumably with greater access to information about our military and our enemies' capabilities than all but a handful of people in the country, talking out of school with a couple of the most notorious despots in the world.

Syria, which is still home base for the terrorists blowing up our soldiers, and Saudi Arabia, which was where the Islamic terrorist movement started, are not the kind of places to get chatty about our military plans.

Rockefeller didn't mention his grand tour of the Middle Eastern totalitarian states sooner for good reason. Even people who don't know beans about foreign policy know that you don't bring other countries, especially dangerous ones, into your internal disputes.

What is telling about Rockefeller's choice to tell of his Arabian odyssey now is what it says about the shifting political climate.

Democrats are tripping over each other to distance themselves from this war. No one wants to get caught being complicit with the Bush administration in starting it, to the extent that they would rather be seen as more helpful to the Syrians than the White House.

We presumably will have a presence there for many years to come, and we can expect Iraq to be the major recipient of foreign aid for just as long. But the end of our major involvement in Iraq is in sight.

The Iraqis are making themselves a government and have been willing to risk their own lives to participate in a democracy. The number of trained soldiers and police are approaching an appropriate level.

The insurgency won't disappear all at once, but in time the murderous movement will limp to a halt or evolve into a Sunni-Shi'a civil war. But we now can see that our role will begin to shift in the near term.

For those people at home and abroad who have been waiting to be proved right by our failure there, it's a crucial moment.

This conflict won't be ended by a peace treaty on a battleship. A decade from now we will have only begun to see the impact of our experiment in Iraq, for good or for ill.

But if the president manages in the months to come to start the troop drawdown and can let the public see the end is in sight, it will be an impossible setback for the liberal left to overcome.

Opposing the war is all the left has, and even they can see that we are entering a new phase in Iraq.

They also understand that they need to at least create the appearance that they have been the ones who brought the troops home. Call it the "Success-in-not-an-Option" strategy.

But as John Kerry knows well, a strategy that depends on American military failure and a demoralized public is not something that voters will reward.

Chris Stirewalt is political editor for The State Journal. He can be reached at (304) 720-6553 or by email at cstirewalt@statejournal.com.