Vice President Cheney, in an interview with the Politico, laid down the marker for Iraq. It remains to be seen how Democrats will challenge the White House line on Iraq now that Iraq appears to be more secure. It's clear that few, if any, leading Democrats will embrace the Center for American Progress view that a year is time enough to get all the troops out.

Michael O'Hanlon, writing in USA Today, outlines what many national security Democrats want, namely, a plan for what O'Hanlon calls "sustainable stability" in Iraq over the long term. O'Hanlon's Dec. 5 op-ed is a followup to his piece last summer suggesting that the surge was working. He's got the ear of Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel in the House, according to the Post.

First, Cheney:

“I am fairly confident we’ll have [Iraq] in a good place, where we’ll be able to look back on it and say, 'That was the right decision. It was a sound decision going into Iraq,'” Cheney told us in a 40-minute White House interview.

Sounding a note of caution, the vice president said: "We've got a lot of work to do. We're sort of halfway through the surge, in a sense. We'll be going back to pre-surge levels over the course of the next year."

But Cheney said that by the middle of January 2009, it will be clear that “we have in fact achieved our objective in terms of having a self-governing Iraq that’s capable for the most part of defending themselves, a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a nation that will be a positive force in influencing the world around it in the future.”

All of that by 2009? “Yes, sir,” he replied.

Here's O'Hanlon:

We now have a realistic chance, not of victory, but of what my fellow Brookings scholar Ken Pollack and I call sustainable stability. Violence rates have dropped by half to two-thirds in the course of 2007, the lowest level in years. Iraq is still very unstable, but it has a chance.

Despite this progress, many Democrats are inclined to provide Bush the roughly $12 billion a month he requests for Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008 only if the money is devoted narrowly to counterterrorism and bringing home U.S. troops. This is a mistake.

Going positive

On strategic grounds, it appears that we now have an opportunity to salvage something significant in Iraq. Given sectarian tensions and brittle Iraqi institutions, this almost surely requires us to execute a gradual drawdown of U.S. forces there rather than an abrupt departure. In political terms, it would be rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory to mandate an end to an operation, however unpopular, just when it is showing its first signs of progress.

Democrats should change course. Rather than demand an end to the operation no matter what, they should continue to keep up the pressure for positive results in Iraq. They can retain their anti-war stance, emphasizing that their default position is that U.S. troops should soon come home absent continued major progress. The surge was never designed as just a military operation; it was intended to create political space for Iraqis to forge reconciliation with each other across sectarian lines. Since that is for the most part not yet happening, it is perfectly reasonable for the Democrats to demand more as a condition for continued funding.

By the way, O'Hanlon is (1) a supporter of "soft partition" of Iraq, and (2) an adviser to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign who "suspended" his participation because he was too supportive of the surge.