Blackburn for President.

Forget the melanoma question, he's looking forward:

The record shows, nonetheless, that the death rate slowed when the surge upped the number of troops to 160,000. The correct Democratic response to that should be not that the surge is a failure but why in heck weren't there enough troops there to get that effect four years ago? We know the answer. It's because the president put his faith in ludicrous strategies in the first place. Democrats can't say that if they also want to say that more troops are ineffective in the second place. Republicans can't say it at all if they want White House support in the fall.

Now, there are some things that more troops never were going to do. They were not going to make peace between Sunnis and Shiites who hate each other. Our presence simply gave them us to blame for their own failure to create politics.

Another thing more troops in Iraq were never going to do is bring down Al-Qaeda. Mr. Bush's Iraq adventure has dragged on longer than World War II. Hitler was protected by military forces that were well-trained and equipped by the standards of the day. It didn't take as long to get him as it is taking to get Osama bin Laden. Hitler might have done better if he had run the Third Reich from a cave in the Alps, but probably it seems that way only due to a difference in U.S. leadership. We didn't use Pearl Harbor as an excuse to invade Bolivia.

The trouble with candidates who can't speak clearly about what's happening is that then they can't speak clearly about what they hope to make happen. Nearly all the Democrats and Republican Rep. Ron Paul talk about bringing the troops home as if they would come on a magic carpet instead of rental Boeings. Who, for example, would protect the last group to leave? Details, details? No, seriously: If Mr. Bush messed up getting us in, there are any number of ways his successor can mess up getting us out. Not thinking about it in advance is a guarantee that the successor will choose one of them.

Most of the Republicans talk about not abandoning freedom-lovers among the Iraqis, whoever and wherever they are. That sounds a lot like standing down when the Iraqis stand up. How they can do that with its leaders warning that the Army will reach its breaking point next year is something best left to someone else's imagination.

The test for the Republican winner will come at his convention. Gen. Colin Powell warned in advance that invading Iraq was accepting what he called "Pottery Barn rules - you break it, you own it." The president's pals dismissed that warning as "details, details" when he made it. Next summer, watch how much prominence he gets at the GOP convention. It will show how well - if at all - the candidate has learned the lesson.

Gen. Powell's warning may have been the last time a U.S. official got an Iraq prediction right. Maybe that's because he wasn't running for anything. Anyway, more troops on the street, like more cops on the beat, made the bad guys keep their heads down. That's all the surge did. It's all it ever could have done.