You Just Can't Win
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, November 21, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Iraq: No matter how much good news the surge brings or what miracles our troops pull off, congressional Democrats insist we not accept anything short of defeat. What an insult to those in uniform.
"We can't win militarily," declared John Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, on Tuesday, dismissing as irrelevant the extraordinary gains by U.S. forces in Iraq since President Bush placed Gen. David Petraeus in charge.
Before Petraeus successfully implemented his counterinsurgency strategy with 30,000 new soldiers and Marines, Democratic leaders were assuring us that Iraq was a lost cause militarily.
Why doesn't the president realize that his misguided mission has descended into a hopeless civil war in which our troops can do no good? they asked. And they demanded he accept the "defeat with dignity" recommendations of the bipartisan Washington insiders of the Iraq Study Group last year.
But the president refused to believe the answer in Iraq was, as the Baker-Hamilton report advised, chin-wagging with terrorist states like Syria and nuclear wannabes like Islamofascist Iran. He replaced his George McClellans with a U.S. Grant, and within a remarkably short time Iraq was the furthest thing from a lost cause.
Attacks on civilians are now down 55% since the surge began, down 75% in Baghdad. Yet to all the against-the-odds achievements of our brave troops, the man who holds the military's purse strings in the Democratic-controlled Congress shrugs his shoulders.
"To change the political law, it doesn't seem to me you need the military stability," Rep. Murtha told Capitol Hill reporters.
Iraq's amazing progress, however, goes beyond military stability to ethnic and political reconciliation. The remarkable partnerships between Shiites and Sunnis in ejecting al-Qaida, as seen in Anbar province, have now spread far and wide, with tens of thousands of Iraqi men of conflicting stripe working together on community policing.
Adopting "the United States can't win in Iraq" as a rallying cry has proved to be a colossal misjudgment for Democrats. So Murtha and his patroness, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have resorted to an absurd assertion: Winning this "unwinnable" war doesn't really matter.
Consequently, Murtha and House Democrats last week passed another bill to hold our troops hostage, this time making $50 billion of vitally needed battlefield funds contingent on a pullout. Republican senators blocked the measure.
The Democrats who run Congress and campaign for president are themselves hostages — to MoveOn.org and the rest of their well-funded leftist-peacenik base. They are not allowed to join ordinary Americans in celebrating victory anymore. To those fanatics who give Democratic politicians so much money, losing to our terrorist enemies isn't everything. It's the only thing. |
