Surrender plans for Iraq

Frank Gaffney:

This week, senators will consider a variety of Iraq-related initiatives euphemistically dubbed "redeployments," "withdrawals," "regional negotiations" and "changes in strategy." These legislative gambits will result in something very different, however. Call it surrender.

This is most obviously the case with respect to a proposal to begin removing U.S. forces from Iraq advanced by Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. The first units would have to come out within 120 days, irrespective of conditions on the ground. Nearly all troops would have to be out by April, except those responsible for what would likely become missions impossible, such as protecting the U.S. Embassy and countering al Qaeda.

At work here seems to be a determination to hand President Bush a defeat, irrespective of the implications that the associated, literal defeat of our forces will have in Iraq and far beyond. Incredibly, an actual majority of the House of Representatives — including four Republicans — has now embraced this disastrous course.

Some of Capitol Hill's other armchair generals propose to "relocate" the forces removed from Iraq to Kuwait or some other, "over-the-horizon" location. We are told they could then be reintroduced if things get ugly in Iraq — say, if al Qaeda's friends or Iranian-backed groups fill the vacuum of power created by our bailing out. Fat chance.

First of all, it is certain that one or both of these predictable results will eventuate. Few, if any, of those insisting on our troops' extrication from a less-bad mess will be willing to support their renewed exposure to even greater dangers. And who's to say Kuwait will be willing to take our displaced legions, making the emirate the next battleground for the Islamofascists' "liberation" of Arab and Muslim lands?

Then, there are the admirers of the blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton. Fourteen senators led by Lamar Alexander, Tennessee Republican, and Ken Salazar, Colorado Democrat, have embraced language that would impose on the president nearly 100 recommendations cooked up by this unelected, unaccountable gaggle of former this-es and thats. Baker and Company earned the sobriquet the "Iraq Surrender Group" with their report issued last December, which dressed up the U.S. retreat from Iraqi territory with "regional negotiations."

In such negotiations, the foreign policy establishmentarians have in mind enlisting specifically Iran and Syria in the hope of securing their help with our extrication from Iraq. This proposition amounts to ignoring and, worse yet, rewarding the direct role played by the Islamofascist mullahocracy in Tehran and its Syrian proxy in the murder of hundreds of Americans and vastly larger numbers of Iraqis, and the ongoing subversion of the government in Baghdad. It is hard to imagine an outcome that would be more certain of failure, not only in Iraq but in the wider world, to say nothing of a more lasting stigma.

Most recently, Republican Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana and John Warner of Virginia have come up with a "compromise." They would not explicitly require the president to remove any forces from Iraq, either at the moment or according to some arbitrary deadline. Instead, they propose to tell Mr. Bush to begin planning now for the failure and/or congressional repudiation of his "surge" plan in September.

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The headlong rush to surrender and rout is ridiculous. The only place we are losing this war is in Washington. We are certainly not losing on the battlefields of Iraq. The enemy has done well in the media battle space, but it has had great assistance from the surrender lobby of the Democrat party which has a visceral reaction to the sue of force for any purpose. They want to return to the failed lawfare model used by the Clinton administration while giving constitutional rights to the enemy combatants knowing full well it will require releasing all of the terrorist at Gitmo no of whom got a Miranda warning when they were captured or interrogated.