There are two interesting things on the Internets today. And the day is still young!

As many early-risers including Hugh have already noted, the New York Times ran a potentially seismic op-ed piece today by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the hard left Brookings Institution. The authors have just returned from a trip to Iraq, and they saw what everyone else has seen – noteworthy progress:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference…

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

By all means, read the whole thing. If the left has lost Brookings…I will monitor left wing Blogistan today for posts explaining why O’Hanlon and Pollack are in fact neo-con chickenhawk hacks and always have been.

One of the key takeaways from their report is that David Petraeus is doing an outstanding job. If you think that fact will inhibit the left’s attempts to minimize and marginalize him, you haven’t been paying attention the left over the past five years.

Over at The American Prospect’s blog, the kids that had the good sense to go to work for TAP and not The New Republic are having a little conversation about the allegedly rocky relationship between Petraeus and Nouri Al-Maliki. TAPper Robert Farley, responding to a suggestion elsewhere that the Bush administration will pull Petraeus from Iraq because of his and Al-Maliki’s differences, writes:

Eh... Nouri Al-Maliki looks a lot more like Ngo Dinh Diem to me than Chiang Kai Shek. Indeed, he bears even more resemblance to the endless series of jokers, like Nguyen Cao Ky, who "ruled" South Vietnam at one point or another during the war. The Bush administration and its neoconservative allies have invested too much of their prestige in Petraeus to let someone as tangential to the war effort as the Prime Minister of Iraq get in the way. Remember, Petraeus is the Ulysses S. Grant to Bush's Lincoln, the Creighton Abrams to Bush's... Nixon? Anyway, he's not going anywhere.

What I find most noteworthy about that paragraph is how it evidences the casual disdain for Petraeus that has now become de rigeur for the left. Attacking Petraeus has quickly and almost silently become a core part of the left’s anti-war agenda.

As I said last week, this is a dangerous game for the left. When their Senators begin playing it in September, they’ll find out just how dangerous.

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