Will We Run Again?

The Democrats have a strategy for winning in Iraq all right. That strategy is to lose:

Democrats, who won control of the U.S. Congress, said on Sunday they will push for a phased withdrawal of American troops from Iraq to begin in four to six months, but the White House cautioned against fixing timetables.

“First order of business is to change the direction of Iraq policy,” said Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is expected to be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in the new Congress.

Democrats will press President George W. Bush’s administration to tell the Iraqi government that U.S. presence was “not open-ended, and that, as a matter of fact, we need to begin a phased redeployment of forces from Iraq in four to six months,” Levin said on ABC’s “This Week” program.

Bush has insisted that U.S. troops would not leave until Iraqis were able to take over security for their country, and has repeatedly rejected setting a timetable for withdrawal because, he says, that would only embolden the insurgents.

The White House said, however, that Bush is open to new ideas. Bush will meet on Monday with the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that is expected to recommend alternative policies in its final report.

They are not even seated in Congress yet as the majority and they are already talking about running from Iraq in 6 months. Meanwhile we have Pelosi calling for Mr. Cut and Run himself, Mr. Murtha, to be the Majority leader:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), in line to become Speaker in January, is throwing her support to Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) in the race for Majority Leader, a move that will be an early test of her influence and will weigh heavily on Murtha’s contest with Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) for the post.

Pelosi, in a letter distributed Sunday to newly elected House Democrats, wrote that Murtha’s outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq helped change the electoral campaign for the House this fall. Murtha began calling for a U.S. pullout from Iraq a year ago, and his open opposition to the war made him a focus of intense criticism from Republicans and the White House.

So there you have it. We already know that even though the Times lied recently about the number of hearings on Iraq: (via Protein Wisdom)

The New York Times opines:

Under Republican control, Congress has exercised virtually no oversight of the administration’s misconduct of the war, and the new Democratic leadership is eager to hold extensive hearings. The public deserves a full accounting (backed by subpoenas, if necessary) of how prewar intelligence was cooked, why American troops were sent to war without adequate armor, and where billions of dollars in reconstruction aid disappeared to.

A cursory look the schedules for a few Congressional committees and sub-committees shows that in the past 18 months to 2 years there were only these three days of hearings. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And thisthis one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one in October 2005, which was described as the 30th full Sen. Foreign Relations Cmte hearing on Iraq held since January 2003. And there were the “Phase I” and “Phase II” reports on prewar intell by the Sen. Intell Cmte. And Congress created the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces–according to the New York Times.

That the Democrats are planning on many more to come. Add this to their obvious future efforts to run like cowards from Iraq and we are bearing witness to a paper tiger incarnate. We’ve run from Vietnam when the Democrats gained power, we ran from Somalia while a Democrat was in power, we were too afraid to seriously retailate against Al-Qaeda during the 90’s while a Democrat was in power, and now we will witness the Democrats ongoing attempts to emasculate the United States in full high definition.

Question is, will Bush stop them?

I have faith that he will never agree to bring the troops home before they complete the mission. Some are worried that he will adopt the Baker “Vietnam Redux” plan:

The Baker commission seems to be doing a lot more than just re-thinking Iraq. It appears to be copiously leaking a Vietnam-type cut-and-run plan that will leave the Gulf far more dangerous than it is now. The Vietnam model looks like a “face-saving” retreat by the United States–just like that one that left Vietnam a Stalinist prison state with tens of thousands of boat people fleeing and dying, and next door in Cambodia, two or three million dead at the hands of Pol Pot.

But I just don’t see it. Remember that voters just barely put the Democrats in power, and are a bit worried about what they may do: (via Michelle Malkin)

While a bare majority of 51 percent called the Democrats’ victory “a good thing,” even more said they were concerned about some of the actions a Democratic Congress might take, including 78 percent who were somewhat or very concerned that it would seek too hasty a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Another 69 percent said they were concerned that the new Congress would keep the administration “from doing what is necessary to combat terrorism,” and two-thirds said they were concerned it would spend too much time investigating the administration and Republican scandals.

So, my gut feeling is that Bush will not bend to the will of Pelosi, Murtha, and apparently Baker, because he understands that the end result of cutting and running from Iraq would be a pure disaster all the way around. Our soldiers would have died in vain while Al-Qaeda takes over Iraq. Those people who counted on us to stay and protect them until they can protect themselves will have been left high and dry to the murderous thugs of Al-Qaeda and Iran.

It won’t happen. It must not happen.

This doesn’t mean the Democrats will not try tho. The terrorists around the world rejoiced after Tuesday, as did the Democrats. They understand, as Steyn points out, that the results of this election was a huge blinking neon sign reading “we’ll give up in a few”

The enemy aren’t a bunch of simpleton Pushtun yakherds, but relatively sophisticated at least in their understanding of us. We’re all infidels, but not all infidels crack the same way. If they’d done a Spain — blown up a bunch of subway cars in New York or vaporized the Empire State Building — they’d have re-awoken the primal anger of September 2001. With another mound of corpses piled sky-high, the electorate would have stampeded into the Republican column and demanded the U.S. fly somewhere and bomb someone.

The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson — that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia — a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election — you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections — 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada — but that’s not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they’re dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn’t made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn’t merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other “stability” fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.

Now it’s up to us to make sure the cowards (read Democrats) don’t succeed in allowing our enemy control of a nation state.

UPDATE

Need anymore proof that the Democrats have now become, officially, the party that backs terrorists?

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is expected to take over as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and The (Calif.) Daily Journal reports that Leahy is drafting a bill to undo portions of the new law in an effort to restore habeas corpus rights for enemy combatants.

A spokeswoman for Leahy told the newspaper the bill would be intended to repeal portions of the law that prevent some detainees from pursuing federal court challenges to the government’s authority to hold them indefinitely.

Spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler told the newspaper the goal is to “try and do something to reverse the damage.”

Can you imagine giving Nazi’s these kind of rights after being picked up on the battlefield? Do they want our soldiers to have to mirandize them now?

This is the kind of mindset that got us backed into a corner in the first place. This is NOT a law enforcement issue dammit.

Other’s Blogging:

• Stop The ACLU
• Little Green Footballs
• Riehl World View
• Blue Crab Boulevard
• Cold Fury
• Hot Air
• A Blog For All
• Don Surber
• Hyscience
• Carol Platt Liebau
• Wizbang
• Squiggler

The Democrats are planning on many more to come. Add this to their future efforts to run like cowards from Iraq and we bear witness to a paper tiger incarnate. We’ve run from Vietnam when the Democrats gained power, we ran from Somalia while a Democrat was in power, we were too afraid to seriously retailate against Al-Qaeda during the 90’s while a Democrat was in power, and now we will witness the Democrats ongoing attempts to emasculate the United States in full high defination.

Curt

See author page