The Wall Street Journal-20080216-Quitting Before Winning- Victory Around the Corner

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Quitting Before Winning, Victory Around the Corner

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I read your editorial "Looking Forward in Iraq" (Feb. 14) on Rep. Nancy Pelosi's defeatist rant on CNN.

It brings to mind something that I recently read in President Grant's memoirs. In the summer of 1864, President Lincoln cautioned Grant against any offensive action that might feed into the Democratic campaign mantra that the war was lost, there was no way to win and that we must pull our troops out of the South.

Grant says that the rhetoric at the Democratic convention that summer was more treasonous than anything ever said in South Carolina.

The defeatist view of 1864 was despite the Nationals controlling the Mississippi, numerous ports on the Confederate coast, Lee having been pushed back all the way to Richmond and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman just having swept down from Tennessee into Mississippi and entering Georgia to begin his March to the Sea.

George Bevis

Richmond, Vt.