The Democrats Ask: Why Not Defeat?

Democrats Aim to Block Funds for Plan

So let's be clear:

The Democrats want the U.S. out of Iraq, sooner rather than later, and within 12 months in any event. Their reasons for wanting this are various, but they seem all to have reached the same conclusion by whatever road. Some, like Rep. Rangel, may openly claim that they have no responsibility for imagining the consequences of that course, but most prefer simply not to acknowledge that the sun will rise on the day after the last American is helicoptered out of Iraq.

Some Democrats may say that they don't wish for an American abandonment of Iraq--although those are becoming fewer every day--but rather that the American support for Iraq should be limited to training Iraqi forces. This is merely a recapitulation of the Iraqisation programme which everyone has now agreed is currently inoperative.

Embracing this strategy with the mere addition of a timetable for ending it guarantees only that the current situation which is supposed to be intolerable to the American voters will only become steadily worse as the political and military manoeuvring of factions within Iraq escalates to higher and higher levels of violence the closer the deadline of American withdrawal approaches. If the current level of violence indicates a failed policy, it is unclear what the Democratic alternative is except a steady spiralling increase of violence coupled with the collapse of U.S. military morale as the rankers realise that one of them left in Iraq is going to get to be the last man killed for what the Democrats want branded a mistake from which they propose to simply walk away.

This is not leadership; this isn't even politics. This is infantile wishful thinking coupled with a prerational animus against Bush which blinds the Democrats to the long-term damage done to American credibility by the feckless abandonment of those Iraqis who will have been proven foolish enough to rely upon our resolve.