Effort to legislate defeat in Iraq fails

NY Times:

A proposal that Democrats put forward as their best chance of changing the course of the Iraq war died on the Senate floor on Wednesday, as Republicans stood firmly with President Bush.

With other war initiatives seemingly headed for the same fate, Senate Democrats, who only two weeks ago proclaimed September to be the month for shifting course in Iraq, conceded that they had little chance of success.

They said their strategy would now focus on portraying Republicans as opposing any change and on trying to chip away support for the White House as the war continued.

The proposal that failed Wednesday fell 4 votes short of the 60 needed to prevent a filibuster and would have required that troops be given as much time at home as they had spent overseas before being redeployed.

There were 56 votes in favor, including 6 Republicans — one fewer than the 7 Republicans who joined the Democrats in July, when the measure, by Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, also fell 4 votes short.

Supporters of Mr. Bush’s war strategy declared victory, saying they had firmly beaten back legislative efforts to change course.

“It means that Congress will not intervene in the foreseeable future,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Independent who has voted with the Republicans on war issues. “The fact that it didn’t get enough votes says that Congress doesn’t have the votes to stop this strategy of success from going forward.”

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I think it only got that many votes because they knew they did not have a chance of passing it and some Democrats and a handful of Republicans were getting their marker down for the useful idiot constituency who want to lose the war. This is being charitable to those who voted in favor of this bad faith legislation.

Congress has no business trying to determine what the troop levels should be in a combat theater anyway. Those matters are properly in the hands of the commanders. It is never in the commanders interest to use his troops in a way that they are ineffective and it is his responsibility to see that they stay effective. Trying to legislate that role is just ridiculous.

What is clear is that this was just a back door vote to lose the war without taking responsibility for it. It is the cowardly way of the Democrats to never take responsibility for the mess they make and this is just one more example. What the Democrats are desperate to do is create a disaster in Iraq that they can blame on this administration.

While they and their allies in the media have proclaimed Iraq a disaster for years now, that is a wholly bogus charge. The war has been difficult but not disastrous by any meaningful military or historical standard and those who make such statements are just showing their ignorance of military history or their dishonesty.

We are in fact defeating the enemy in Iraq with a force less than half the size of the one we had in Vietnam and our casualties are not even 10 percent of the casualties we had in Vietnam. It is just absolutely ignorant to call the current war disastrous.

The attempts to ignore the success we are having in the recent surge operation is just more evidence of the bad faith in which the Democrats are approaching the war. They are the most disloyal opposition since the Copperheads.