California Conservative

Captain Ed is all over a Washington Post editorial chastising Pelosi and Murtha for Murtha’s Slow Bleed 3.0 plan. If that isn’t bad enough, Ted Koppel ridiculed them Sunday on Meet the Press. First let’s look at the Washington Post editorial:

In short, the Democratic proposal to be taken up this week is an attempt to impose detailed management on a war without regard for the war itself. Will Iraq collapse into unrestrained civil conflict with “massive civilian casualties,” as the U.S. intelligence community predicts in the event of a rapid withdrawal? Will al-Qaeda establish a powerful new base for launching attacks on the United States and its allies? Will there be a regional war that sucks in Iraqi neighbors such as Saudi Arabia or Turkey? The House legislation is indifferent: Whether or not any of those events happened, U.S. forces would be gone.

Where have we heard it before that abandoning the Iraqis would create a vacuum into which al Qa’ida and Iran would naturally migrate into? Let’s also ask why the Washington Post is so late in figuring this out. Why didn’t they write about this last fall? Didn’t the truth matter then? Is it that they were too busy digesting the Democrats’ talking points to figure it out? I think we know the answer to that question, don’t we?

Let’s look at Koppel ridiculing the Democrats:

MR. RUSSERT: Ted Koppel, what do you see?

MR. KOPPEL: I see a lot of wishful thinking going on here in Washington right now. I mean, when Congress talks about, first of all, setting these, these milestones—and the irony is if the Iraqis successfully meet the milestones, the implication is we stay. If they fail to meet the milestones, we leave. It doesn’t make any sense at all. It ought to be the other way around. If they fail, we stay because they need us; if they succeed, we can start to pull out again. So I, I have this feeling that, on the one hand, the Democrats are making a great deal of hay out of—out of saying, “We have to get out of Iraq,” and, indeed, we do at some point or another, but the notion that the war will be over when we pull out of Iraq and even after we pull out of Afghanistan, you heard what General Abizaid had to say, it’s not going to be over. It’s going to be a different war, but the war continues.

MR. RUSSERT: Our children’s children’s war.

MR. KOPPEL: Exactly.

You know that you’re heading in the wrong direction when Ted Koppel is ridiculing your policy for being shortsighted and delusional, which is what he did, just not in those words. Democrats have talked about getting out of Iraq, then sending troops to Afghanistan to “fight the real war” on terror. Koppel is essentially saying that the “real war” is in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. He repeated what President Bush has said countless times: that this is a long war. This war is one that requires steadfastness and the right planning and execution. It requires boots on the ground, actionable, concise intelligence and the halting of the terrorist money supplies.

Of course, the Democrats’ plan is lacking in all of those areas.

That isn’t the only thing that Murtha’s and Pelosi’s plan is missing. It’s also missing a spine, which is required if you’re interested in winning the war. They aren’t interested in winning the war because their campaigns are fueled by contributions from the anti-war Nutroots crowd. They’ve convinced themselves that they must march to the Nutroots’ orders if they hope to get the campaign contributions that they’ll need to win. The sad truth is that if they chose a tack that’s based on winning, they’d appeal to a much larger section of Americans. In doing so, they’d marginalize the Nutroots, too.

When everything is said and done, Democrats are being painted into a tight corner. That corner will get tighter if the surge keeps yielding the positive results, too. Democrats should be utterly frightened by that possibility. If the surge shows lasting positive results, swing voters will abandon the Democrats en masse, which would eliminate the Democrats’ majorities and end Ms. Pelosi’s speakership.

Technorati Tags: Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, Iraq War, Hillary, Obama, Election 2008, Ted Koppel, Washington Post, Netroots

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 7:52 am and is filed under Activism, Author: Gary Gross, Election 2008, Hillary, Iraq, Military, Pelosi, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.