Resolution about politic, not about a winning strategy

Dan Burton:

For more than a year, my Democratic colleagues have called for our withdrawal from Iraq because urging such a course was politically advantageous.
They have tried many strategies, from demanding adherence to artificial time tables to trying to force negotiations with Iran and Syria, countries known to be inciting the violence in Iraq, all to no avail. Now an emboldened Democratic-controlled Congress, eager to court favor with the far-left of their party for the coming 2008 presidential election, has embraced a new strategy for American defeat in Iraq: a resolution to prevent the president from carrying out his strategy of sending additional troops to Iraq to end the violence.
This resolution has already been approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. While nonbinding, the resolution clearly is intended to send a message to the president that this Congress can -- and won't hesitate to -- "cut and run" if the going gets tougher, as it is sure to do. It also sends a dangerous message to our fighting men and women in Iraq, that this Democratic Congress is not serious about supporting them. It seems to me this resolution, binding or not, aims precisely to precipitate withdrawal at the cost of more American lives, for purely political purposes, and I find it shameful.
If our troops don't receive the vital support they need -- support that would come from the president's surge -- they won't be able to execute the missions necessary to secure Iraq, which means more bloodshed. Eventually we would reach a point where militarily, our battle for Iraq would be unwinnable, and we will have no choice but to withdraw.
America has invested heavily in Iraq, in both blood and treasure. Despite what the war's critics would like to think, Iraq has become the central front in the Global War on Terror, and the terrorists know it. If we withdraw from this pivotal front before we defeat the terrorists, we will pay for it with the lives of our many men and women already in Iraq, and we will pay for it in the future, on even bloodier battlefields. American defeat would be detrimental to our long-term security, to say nothing of what it would do to the Middle East's geopolitical landscape.
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When a party seeks partisan gain from our military defeat in Iraq, it is a party that has lost the plot. The Copperhead Democrats are a reprehensible lot who will go down in history as undermining our war effort and giving hope to our enemies that could not defeat our troops. It is a betrayal of unprecedented proportions. Ted Kennedy who is one of the leading Copperheads said at the start of this war that it was "concocted in Texas for partisan gain." He was clearly wrong about that, but the Democrat strategy for defeat is clearly one they believe will give them partisan gain and many who voted to go to war in Iraq are now the ones sounding the loudest for retreat.