<Do you see any self-contradiction in your statements: "I think it is obvious that the Iraq situation is not turning out the way the Left thought it would."

and: "even a lot of liberals agree. 62 percent of California Democrats support using military action to remove Saddam from power."?

The two statements aren't really connected.

First of all, I think we can all agree that the two sets, "The Left" and "Democratic voters," while they overlap, are certainly not congruent. To be more precise, while all Leftists may be Democratic voters (or at least Greens), not all Democratic voters are what you would define as a Leftist. Heck, not all Democratic voters are even simply liberal.* I would think California Democrats would lean farther left than most, though, which is why I found the survey significant.

Second, there is a hell of a big difference between someone "thinking we would win the war" and someone who actually "supports the war."

The survey did not ask, "do you think the U.S. will win the military conflict?" It asked, "Do you support military action to remove Saddam from power?" It's hard to interpret that as anything other than the idea that we rightfully ought to be there, and it's significant, at least to me, that 62 percent of California Democrats (CALIFORNIA Democrats!) feel that way.

In my personal case, I don't know of anybody who thought that we would not kick Saddam's butt and the losses would be almost exclusively Iraqi.

Oh, yeah. Nobody you knew said that this would be a quagmire, that we wouldn't lose hundreds of soldiers taking Baghdad. A week or so back, the term "house-to-house fighting" was heard every five minutes. And nobody you knew predicted tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, or any other disasters that didn't happen. Well, maybe you don't actually know any real leftists. I could buy that. Maybe.

But this is NOT turning out the way the Hollywood/Michael Moore/Noam Chomsky/etc. axis claimed it would, although as I could have told you, they're covering up their messy predictions as fast as possible.

*The two sets, when applied to Democratic Party leaders, overlap a LOT, but that's another story.