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In his testimony, General Petreaus recommended 30,000 troops be withdrawn by July 2008.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.Â
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.