Democrats Fight For Principle

Imagine if the Democrats brought the same energy they bring to fighting the President to the real U.S. enemy. What a formidable United States we would have. They act as if there will be no consequences should their hoped-for actions become reality. Captain Ed quotes Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat Senator, who seems to understand the consequences:

When we say that U.S. troops shouldn’t be “policing a civil war,” that their operations should be restricted to this narrow list of missions, what does this actually mean?
To begin with, it means that our troops will not be allowed to protect the Iraqi people from the insurgents and militias who are trying to terrorize and kill them. Instead of restoring basic security, which General Petraeus has argued should be the central focus of any counterinsurgency campaign, it means our soldiers would instead be ordered, by force of this proposed law, not to stop the sectarian violence happening all around them—no matter how vicious or horrific it becomes.

In short, it means telling our troops to deliberately and consciously turn their backs on ethnic cleansing, to turn their backs on the slaughter of innocent civilians—men, women, and children singled out and killed on the basis of their religion alone. It means turning our backs on the policies that led us to intervene in the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the principles that today lead many of us to call for intervention in Darfur.

This makes no moral sense at all.

It also makes no strategic or military sense either.

If Iraq wouldn't be a bloodbath after a U.S. "redeployment" (surrender), I'd say that the President should mandate an immediate withdrawal of all troops right now. Call their bluff. Call a Press Conference and concede: while the United States has never lost a war except by choice, the Democrats have convinced me that the will of the American people is to withdraw troops now. Immediately. Harry Reid is right. The Senate Majority leader and all the other Democrats made me see the light. We are going to do it the Democrat's way.

There would be a massacre. And the Democrats would blame Bush (because he wouldn't do the withdrawal the right way, the way they would have done it, the President is a stupid rube, blah, blah, blah). And the Democrats would be okay with all this because they figure that a limbs-strewn Iraq would keep them in power in perpetuity. I figure they figure wrong. More attacks would happen in the United States and in other Western countries. Americans will die. The war, won't be, as promised, over. The war will have only really begun. Weakness brings out the predators.

But being the short-sighted, expedient types, the Democrats wish to win only one war--against President Bush. The should be reminded that their enemy retires in a year and half.