Harry Reid’s home town paper sees what I see:
If Democrats truly want to end the war, they need do only one thing: Go home. Do not meet with the president, do not work for a compromise that will keep American boys dying in Baghdad. Go home. Take no action. Pass no spending bill whatsoever. By July, existing funds would start to run out. Yes, the White House might cannibalize money from elsewhere for a time. But within months, whatever funds remained would have to be used to fuel up the planes and ships to bring the boys home.
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Now, mind you, the fact that the Democrats are racing to get some money into the pipeline so the troops don’t run out of ammo is a good thing. Their reasons are more cynical political calculus than patriotism — they know that declaring the war lost, pulling out and leaving the Iraqis to suffer a massive bloodbath does not play well in the polls.
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So the strategy of Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Vichy, has been to go through the motions of “trying to cut off funding for the war” so they can tell the Neville Chamberlain branch of their own constituency, “We gave it our best shot” — all the while with no intention on God’s green earth of ever really seeing it happen.
This is good, because (as President Bush has rightly pointed out) announcing to the enemy the date fixed on which you intend to surrender is not exactly a recipe for victory, or even for bolstering your own troops’ morale while undermining the other guys.
Of course, sometime or other they may stumble into actually accomplishing what they are claiming they wish to do. Then they and the Iraqi’s are likely to pay dearly, whatever the polls say now in either Iraq or here. I am not so concerned for the fate of the Democrats, the Iraqi people however concern me a great deal.
Update: Captain Ed makes the same point about the “Sunset Provision” that Hillary is floating now:
Even if it did pass, it would face the same problem as the supplemental. Bush could veto it — in fact, he would rush to do so, for even better reasons than with the supplemental — and Congress would have to override the veto to make it law. Democrats would have to do a lot better than the four Republicans they found this week to override, and they won’t, which makes this just another PR stunt.
Make that a campaign stunt. Hillary wants to build some anti-war credibility for what has turned into a tough primary fight. She needs to atone for her vote to authorize the use of military force in Iraq, and what better way than to write a bill to revoke that authorization? She can do so safe in the knowledge that it will never pass, and that she will bear no responsibility for the result.
That’s been the entire Democratic strategy. Shailagh Murray and Jonathan Weisman make the laughable statement that Democrats are searching for ways to end the war. They have a Constitutional mechanism for doing just that, and it bypasses a veto by simply stopping the funds for the war. However, that would leave Democrats responsible for the catastrophe that would follow an American retreat from Iraq and its devastating impact on the Middle East and our credibility against radical Islamist terrorists. They’re not looking for a way out, they’re looking to score partisan points, and Hillary has just decided to play the game.
[tags] Harry Reid, Democrats, Bush, Iraq, war, Las Vegas Review Journal, war funding. Hillary Clinton, sunset, AUMF [/tags]
