As an exercise in counterintuitive reasoning, see if you can identify the authors of these recent quotes:

“More American troops have brought more peace to more parts of Iraq. I think that's a fact.”

“The military aspects of President Bush's new strategy in Iraq ... appear to have produced some credible and positive results.”

“We’ve begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Al Anbar Province, it’s working.”

A White House spokesman? General Petraeus? A Fox News talking head or a FrontPageMag.com columnist?

None of the above. All three quotes come courtesy of top Democratic senators. The first is from Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois; the second is from Michigan’s Carl Levin; and the third is from none other than Hillary Clinton.

That may come as a surprise. Despite his newly discovered appreciation for the armed forces, Sen. Durbin is best known for sliming American troops at Guantanamo Bay as the effective heirs of “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.” Still, Durbin is apparently willing to acknowledge that these savages, coldly indifferent to human suffering, are bringing “peace” to Iraq.

Likewise, his colleague Carl Levin has been one of the loudest anti-war voices in the Senate. It was only last month that Levin drafted a failed bill that would have forced the U.S. to begin withdrawing troops in the next four months, a deliberate attempt to scuttle the same strategy to which Levin now ascribes “credible and positive results.”

As for Clinton, she has worked tirelessly in the past year to distance herself from her initial support of the war effort. In May, she went so far as to vote against funding for the war so long as the United States remained committed to the “surge.” That would be the same surge that she now believes is “working.”

To conclude from this that the senators are willing to support American war policy is to underestimate the depths of cynicism in the Democratic Party. No sooner had Sen. Clinton praised the surge in her Monday speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention than she insisted that the surge was a failure after all. “We’re just years too late changing our tactics,” Clinton averred.

But the prize for least logical transition should properly go to Clinton’s rival Barack Obama, who used the occasion of his Tuesday appearance at the convention to laud the troops in Iraq for having “performed brilliantly and bravely,” only to conclude that the surge was… a failure undeserving of continued support. “No military surge, no matter how brilliantly performed, can succeed without political reconciliation and a surge of diplomacy in Iraq and the region,” Obama intoned.

Such bracketed indictments of the surge may sound better than Harry Reid’s reckless claim that “this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything.” Substantively, however, they amount to the same thing.

How to account for the senators’ rhetorical schizophrenia? The most parsimonious answer is that Democrats want to have it both ways. By acknowledging the success of the surge, they are bowing to a hopeful and cresting empirical consensus -- buttressed by a recent op-ed in the New York Times by Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, of the left-of-center Brookings Institution -- that the added troop strength of the surge has measurably increased security in the country and, more optimistically, that Iraq is a winnable war. By insisting that the surge is nonetheless a failure, they are telling their anti-war supporters precisely what they want to hear. Whether this contradictory position -- call it the “surge straddle” -- is smart politics remains to be seen. That it represents a failure of leadership is undeniable.

It would be no easy task to explain why a successful military strategy should be aborted mid-course -- and, indeed, Democrats have declined to offer a coherent explanation. Instead, they have sought to move the goal posts of debate. Their argument runs something like this. True, the surge is showing signs of progress. But the Iraqi government has heretofore proved a failure. Therefore, the surge is a failure.

Lest you think this a caricature, consider that it is just a paraphrase of Carl Levin’s recent statement. Conceding that the “level of violence has been reduced in a number of areas” as a consequence of the surge, Levin maintained that it must still be considered a failure: “The purpose of the surge, by its own terms, was to…give the opportunity to the Iraqi leaders to reach some political settlements. They have failed to do that. They have totally and utterly failed.” In other words, we’re winning, but we can’t win. That’s the surge straddle in a nutshell.

It suffers from one obvious flaw. A principal reason for the Iraqi government’s (admitted) failure is the persistence of terrorist violence and sectarian strife. It was this violence that the surge was intended to stem and, by Levin’s admission, it is doing so. It follows, then, that prematurely withdrawing troops from Iraq all-but-guarantees that the Iraqi government will never gain control of the country. Thus do the Democrats’ declarations of failure become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In her remarks before the VFW this week, Sen. Clinton dwelled at length on her desire to restore America’s image overseas. “People have to root for America,” she said. It’s a fine sentiment. But what a pleasant change it would be if the senator and her party would occasionally lead by example.