Twelve House Democrats signed a letter and sent it to President Bush urging a troop withdrawal in Iraq. The WaPo calls this unity. I call it weak minded political posturing.
After months of struggling to forge a unified stance on the Iraq war, top congressional Democrats joined voices yesterday to call on President Bush to begin withdrawing U.S. troops by the end of the year and to “transition to a more limited mission” in the war-torn nation.
With the midterm elections three months away, and Democrats seeing public discontent over Iraq as their best chance for retaking the House or Senate, a dozen key lawmakers told Bush in a letter: “In the interests of American national security, our troops and our taxpayers, the open-ended commitment in Iraq that you have embraced cannot and should not be sustained. . . . We need to take a new direction.”
The Washington Post, in an attempt to add legitimacy to this show of timidity, mentions that “a number of GOP lawmakers are joining Democrats in criticizing the war’s progress.”
All they can pull out are quotes from two of the biggest Rhino’s in D.C. Hardly a landslide of discontent.
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) last week called Iraq “an absolute replay of Vietnam.” Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-Minn.) recently returned from Iraq with a call for U.S. troops to pull out.
Zzzzzzz…
This issue is dead on arrival. It simply doesn’t resonate with a majority of Americans. Sure, when asked politically biased strategically worded questions, a pollster can manufacture a majority of adults who admit that the U.S. led effort in Iraq could have gone better and that we should leave the country as soon as necessary, but that hardly means quitting. It doesn’t mean time table. It doesn’t mean cut and run. It means we should leave Iraq the day the job is complete and not another day longer. The reality is, Americans want to win, not lose. We like to finish what we started, not leave in the middle of the game. We take pride in not being cowards.
The Dems have given up on Iraq and they’ve given up on our troops. To most Americans, that sounds a lot like surrender.