Category: Antiwar crowd

Now that the troops are in place and they’re “kickin’ ass”, to borrow a phrase from the President, a new surge is under way – this one in Washington, in the halls of the Capitol and the conference rooms in the White House. The surge to bring the troops home.

In his testimony, General Petreaus recommended 30,000 troops be withdrawn by July 2008. The Republicans agree – the Democrats would have agreed if hadn’t come from General Petraeus. (S.A. Miller The Washington Times);

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who failed repeatedly to muster enough votes to compel the president to accept a pullout plan, yesterday said he will try again next week with measures to force significantly larger troop reductions.

“I call on Senate Republicans not to walk lockstep with the president as they have done for years,” the Nevada Democrat said. “It is time to come over and join us.”

Mr. Reid said Democrats will introduce four to six war bills, including measures for large-scale troop reductions and to transition the mission from combat to training Iraqi forces and conducting counterterrorism operations.

He did not provide details of the legislation, but the characterization of measures was nearly identical to failed bills from earlier this year.

It’s like I said in the comments section of a post yesterday, the Democrats are attached to defeat at the forehead – they continue to cling to failed political tactics.

Roy Blunt, ever the realist, quiped;

“We’ve taken a different approach than [Democrats] have on Iraq from the very start,” said Mr. Blunt. “They saw Iraq as a political issue, and we saw it as both a security issue and an issue that had to be above politics for our members.”

The Democrat candidates are trying to get ahead of the administration (Washington Times’ Brian DeBose)

“We must get out strategically and carefully, removing troops from secure areas first, and keeping troops in more volatile areas until later, but our drawdown should proceed at a steady pace of one or two brigades each month,” Mr. Obama said.

A day after hearing the progress report from Army Gen. David H. Petraeus to Congress, Mr. Obama rejected the general’s recommendations and said Iraq’s government has failed to meet its own goals.

His withdrawal proposal reinforces the Iraq war as the major battleground among the Democratic presidential candidates, who have spent the campaign competing with each other for support from the party’s antiwar voters.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama’s adversaries said his plan doesn’t go far enough, with former Sen. John Edwards saying the pace of withdrawal moves too slowly and sounds too much like the general’s recommendation to President Bush to withdraw 30,000 troops by July.

“Taking credit for this gradual withdrawal is like taking credit for gravity,” Mr. Edwards said.

I’d say that about any withdrawal plan at this point. The President was going to withdraw troops when they weren’t needed any longer – we all knew that. The withdrawal might have been complete by now if the Democrats had kept their stupid mouths shut for the last four years and stopped encouraging our enemies.

It must really gall Democrats that the President has improved even minutely in the polls according to the NBCNews/Wall Street Journal poll taken September 7-10th.

As Mr. Bush prepares to follow congressional testimony by the top general in Iraq, David Petraeus, with a televised speech to the nation tonight, the poll shows an uptick in support for the president’s handling of the war as well as a small increase in the proportion of Americans who believe the troop surge is helping and that victory remains possible.

Those shifts in public opinion remain modest. Solid majorities continue to disapprove of the president’s performance and say victory in Iraq isn’t possible and that the war hasn’t been worth its human and financial costs. “There’s been no surge from the American people,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducts the Journal/NBC poll with Republican counterpart Neil Newhouse.

Yet only one in four Americans say troops should leave now regardless of conditions on the ground. The public’s “heads and hearts are going in two different directions,” Mr. Newhouse said. “They want the troops to come home but think we can’t just leave.”

As hard as the Democrats have tried to take the advice of the netroots, it just doesn’t seem to be working against the President.

Of course, the Washington Post is betting on Democrats and calling their repeat of failed legislation “modest bipartisan measures” mischaractertizing the Democrats’ intentions completely;

Democratic leaders in Congress have decided to shift course and pursue modest bipartisan measures to alter U.S. military strategy in Iraq, hoping to use incremental changes instead of aggressive legislation to break the grip Republicans have held over the direction of war policy.

Standing against them will be President Bush, who intends to use a prime-time address tonight to try to ease concerns that his Iraq strategy will lead to an open-ended military commitment.

Both efforts share a single target: a handful of Republican moderates in the Senate whose votes the Democrats need to overcome the threat of a GOP filibuster. Should enough Republican moderates sign on to a compromise measure, Democrats could finally pass legislation aimed at changing direction of the war.

“We’re reaching out to the Republicans to allow them to fulfill their word,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said yesterday. “A number of them are quoted significantly saying that come September that there would have to be a change of the course in the war in Iraq.”

Yeah, we know how Democrats “reach out” – “Our way or the highway”. Mostly because they’ve sold their soul to the netroots – and 30,000 in less than a year isn’t enough to satisfy Nancy Pelosi;

“President Bush’s policy announced by General Petraeus is a path to 10 more years of war in Iraq. General Petraeus’ testimony to Congress drew a bright line: redeployment is not an option; endless war in Iraq is the Administration’s only option.

10 more years of war, huh? That’s a bit of hyperbole – it’s 10 more years of a presence in Iraq – like the 11 years of a presence we’ve had in Bosnia, the nine years of a presence in Kosovo, sixty-two years in Japan, sixty-two years in Germany.

Nor is Harry Reid satisfied with a withdrawal without his consent and blessing;

“This is unacceptable to me, it’s unacceptable to the American people,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Reid said the recommendation by Gen. David Petraeus, expected to be embraced by President Bush in a speech to the nation on Thursday, “is neither a drawdown or a change in mission that we need. His plan is just more of the same.”

Mission? What change in mission have you recommended, Harry? Besides immediate surrender and “redeployment” to the Indian Ocean or some-damn-where. 

But the Washington Post reports that some Democrats are getting angry at the Leftroots’ unprecedented pressure to end the war against terror;

MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group that has spent months pressuring Republicans to turn against the war, is now threatening to turn on Democrats who temper their positions.

But moderate Democrats are feeling emboldened, after nearly nine months of taking their marching orders from the more liberal wing of the party. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (Hawaii), who is pushing a more bipartisan approach, said the antiwar wing has badly overplayed its hand.

But the Post tries to alienate General Petraeus from the President by putting the war entirely on his shoulders;

When he testified before the Senate for his confirmation hearing in January, Petraeus was widely regarded as the quintessential military professional, a credible, independent voice who stood above the political fray.

But when he returned to Capitol Hill this week for marathon hearings and a media blitz, the general labored to retain that image. Partisans sought to portray him either as a politicized officer carrying water for the White House or as the only possible savior of an increasingly unpopular war.

The war in Iraq has diminished the reputations of many of its generals. As Petraeus returns to Baghdad to continue carrying out President Bush’s strategy, his image has changed as well. Like it or not, he has become a political player, and more than ever before, the U.S. venture in Iraq has become his own.

“Up until this week, it was Rumsfeld’s war,” said retired Army Lt. Col. James Jay Carafano, referring to former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. “Now, for better or worse, it’s Dave’s war.”

Funny, the netroots have been calling it Bush’s War – now all of a sudden it’s “Dave’s War”? Why don’t they just call it a war against common sense?

The truth is; the Democrats aren’t interested in ending the war – they need it as an issue next November. That’s why they’re presenting the same tired old failed legislation – they know it won’t pass because it contains draconian reductions in forces. It’s a plan for failure and they know the President is too far above plotics and poll numbers to accept it just to save his legacy.

Like I said yesterday, the Democrats don’t learn from their failures. They think they deserve accolades for being hardheaded, stubborn jackasses. Their bipartisan solutions are nothing more than threats and intimidation. If only they would get as tough and stubborn with our nation’s enemies as they are for purely political reasons.

But, then, simply by the nature of their political beings, Democrats can’t find it within themselves to be leaders – since they live and die by polls, they are followers.

The surge against the Administration has begun in earnest this week. Smelling a political defeat (instead of the military defeats they enjoy), the Democats have begun clinging to their only remaining weapons – deceit and the media. Eric Pfeifer in the Washington Times reports this morning that Joe Biden on Meet the Press yesterday, changed horses in midstream and declared that we need a date certain withdrawal;

“I really respect him, but I think he’s dead flat wrong,” Mr. Biden said when asked about Gen. Petraeus’ expected recommendations. “I will insist on a firm beginning to withdraw the troops, and I will insist on a target date to get American combat forces out.”

Mr. Biden voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq and previously advised against setting a specific timetable for the withdrawal of American forces.

If he figures that Gen. Petraeus is wrong, why’d Biden vote for his confirmation a scant few months ago? Why is Biden bothering to listen to Petraeus?

According to the Wall Street Journal’s Neil King and Greg Jaffe, Biden has been beseiged by reality, though;

Senate Democrats, propelled by strong opposition to the war within their party, have tried for months to force a swifter withdrawal of U.S. forces. Those efforts won some Republican support, but not enough to overcome a presidential veto. Democrats now acknowledge there is little to no chance that enough moderate Republicans will defect to force a major change in strategy.

“Unless we get 67 votes to override a veto there is nothing we can do to end this war,” said Sen. Joseph Biden, (D., Del.) on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Nothing he can do except keep talking down the war. The Washington Times’ Sharon Behn reports that the troops in Iraq say the surge is working but only barely;

Many U.S. soldiers on the ground in Baghdad caution that improved security in the capital city will last only as long as the surge. If American troops were to leave, they say, the insurgents could be back within hours.

U.S. forces broke up insurgent networks and curtailed the ability of terrorists to strike, said Sgt. Gregory Rayho, 30, of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, Stryker Brigade Combat Team, the recipient of three Purple Hearts during his time in Iraq.

His overall assessment is upbeat: “It is my opinion that the surge is working.”

But he also said continued success in the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, where his fellow soldiers patrol, depends on the continued presence of American troops. Should they be withdrawn, the future could be deadly.

Why would the terrorists flow back into the void left by Americans? Is it because they anticipate a military victory? Of course not – they know the desparation of the situtation would only encourage the fifth columnists here in the US to whine and wring their hands and work against our victory with deception and lies.

All for the sake of politics, according to Biden as quoted in the Washington Post;

“What we have done is made it very difficult for Republicans to continue to hide on whether they agree with the president or not on Iraq,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), describing the political gain Democrats think they have achieved since the beginning of the year. “Whether or not they’ll take that final step and actually break by actually overriding a veto, if we ever get to that, or break by supporting very tough language that constricts his movement, remains to be seen.”

They haven’t made it difficult for terrorists in Iraq or terrorists in Afghanistan, or terrorists in Guantanamo – they’ve made it difficult for Republicans in Washington.

And the Iraqis are asking us to stay, asking us for more time (hardly sounds like an occupation by “crusaders” does it);

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told lawmakers Monday that Iraqi forces were not ready to take over security from the U.S. military across the country.

“There have been tangible improvements in security in the recent period in Baghdad and the provinces but it is not enough,” he told parliament.

“Despite the security improvement, we still need more efforts and time in order for our armed forces to be able to take over security in all Iraqi provinces from the multinational forces that helped us in a great way in fighting terrorism and outlaws.”

But the Democrats would rather heed the advice of bin Laden (who sounds more like Al Gore everytime he broadcasts a new video, by the way) and leave the Middle East – the source of most of the world’s problems for decades. The Washington Post puts more emphasis on Ambassador Crocker’s report – because it will show less progress in the last three months;

Yet despite the spotlight focused on what has become known as the Petraeus report, the testimony of the man sitting beside Petraeus at the witness table, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, may carry far more import for the long-term future of Iraq and the U.S. presence there. With little progress to recount in how the Iraqis have used the political “breathing space” that Bush promised his war strategy would create, Crocker’s inevitably more nuanced appeal for time and patience is likely to be the tougher sell.

Yeah, cuz three months of piecing together a political solution for Iraq is an eternity, right? Petraeus will give the good news that the first part of the plan for Iraq is working - the part that needed to be accomplished first.

According to Kamangir’s translation, the Democrats have already succeeded in emboldening the Iranians;

The newly-assigned commander of the IRGC stated, “If the enemy succeeded in securing Iraq, they would definitely attack Iran. Fortunately, and thanks to Muslims of the region, they failed in this conspiracy.” He added “If they are not sure about their plans, that’s because of their failure in Iraq”. “The Islamic Iran has turned into a great regional power…and all world powers are anxious about the power of the Islamic Republic of Iran”