Sending signals of weakness

Washington Times Editorial:

Every so often, we witness a debate that serves to illustrate what is at stake in the congressional debate over funding the war in Iraq. Such was the case on "Fox News Sunday," where Sen. Lindsey Graham debated the issue with Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin. The differences could hardly have been more striking.
Mr. Graham carefully articulated the foolhardiness of framing the issue as a matter of how best to put pressure on the elected Iraqi government. Mr. Levin, by contrast, made it sound as if the primary goal of our military campaign in Iraq is to start withdrawing troops in order to force the Maliki government to meet a checklist of political demands not to defeat jihadists seeking to destabilize the country and establish a caliphate.
Mr. Levin said he hoped that Congress would send President Bush "a very strong bill which would say that we're going to begin to reduce troops in four months as a way of telling the Iraqi leadership that the open-ended commitment is over, not just rhetorically, but, in fact to try to force them to take responsibility for their own country."The senator questioned whether Mr. Bush was "serious" about "holding them to their political commitments,"adding that if Congress failed to override Mr. Bush's veto of legislation emerging from a House-Senate conference, he hoped to send the White House another bill that uses "benchmarks" as "the second best way of putting pressure on the president to put pressure on Iraqis."
By contrast, Mr. Graham made number of important points that are usually lost in congressional debate on the U.S. role in Iraq: that it is a major battleground in the larger war against jihadist terror and that abandoning Iraq in response to car bombings doesn't simply send a message to the Iraqi government; it jeopardizes American interests in our larger national struggle against the Islamists.
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We should not tie our strategy for defeating the enemy to the acts of others who may have different interests and abilities. What Levin proposes is to send a message to our allies instead of to the enemy, but unfortunately the enemy will read the message as giving him hope that we will soon leave if he exerts even more pressure on our ally. Levin's strategy is not that of someone who want s to win, but of someone looking for an excuse to lose.