Bill Kristol over at the Standard
…THE WEEKLY STANDARD has confirmed that there are real discussions going on at the White House, with advocates of what is being called “The Grand Bargain” pushing hard for the president to move soon to announce plans to pull back in Iraq. So this week will not only be a week of (mostly silly) debate on the Hill; it will also be an important moment of truth for the president, who will have to decide whether to give Gen. Petraeus and the soldiers a chance, or to accept the counsel of some of his advisers and begin to throw in the towel on Iraq.
I’m having a difficult time swallowing this one. Is this the guy who stood on that fire truck that day and promised to answer the terrorists? Is this the guy who just a short time ago told everyone that we were in this for the long haul, and for freedom? Is this the guy who has repeatedly asked the country to support the troops and the war on terror?
…Let me be clear: The president ordered the “surge,” which only recently came to full strength and whose major operation has been going on for less than a month. If he were not to give it a chance to work, he would properly be viewed as a feckless, irresolute president, incapable of seeing his own strategy through a couple of months of controversy before abandoning it. He will have asked our soldiers to go on the offensive, assuming greater risk of casualties–and then, even though the offensive is working better than expected, will have pulled the plug on their efforts.
So, what, he didn’t mean it? He didn’t believe it? He “voted for the war”, before he “voted against it”? Over at Townhall we get a little more information
…Collins and five other GOP senators _ Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Robert Bennett of Utah, John Sununu of New Hampshire and Pete Domenici of New Mexico _ support separate legislation calling on Bush to adopt as U.S. policy recommendations by the Iraq Study Group, which identified a potential redeployment date of spring 2008.
Other prominent Republican senators, including Richard Lugar of Indiana, George Voinovich of Ohio, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, also say the U.S. should begin redeployments.
It will be interesting to know who else signs on with these “stalwarts”. Does this smell of melt down, to you too? What are they thinking? Do they really think that backing an amnesty plan and then signing up for the Harry Reid All-American Losers Team is going to inspire the country? In many ways, this nation is even more asleep than it was in the summer of 2001.
Rich Lowery hits it right on the head when he writes
…In a global struggle against Islamic extremism, it is an incontestably welcome development that ordinary Sunnis in the Arab heartland are spurning al-Qaida. The extremist group has been on a campaign of savagery in Iraq that has discredited its own cause. The grassroots revolt against it means that it is within our reach to deny al-Qaida its most important current geopolitical objective, which is plunging Iraq into a bloody chaos in which it can thrive.
But a group of Republican senators have picked precisely this moment to call for deconstructing the troop surge that has begun to give us the upper hand against al-Qaida. They thus reveal a key dishonesty in the debate over the war. Everyone professes to want to fight al-Qaida in Iraq — as opposed to policing the sectarian war — but the number of politicians willing to support the means to that end is ever-dwindling.
Allow me to repeat something Senator Craig said on the floor in February of this year
…The world is listening to this debate. Our men and women in uniform are listening to this debate. The enemies of the cause are listening and saying: Oh, the Senate of the United States is getting cold feet. Our opportunities are at hand. All we have to do is wait them out. All we have to do is accelerate the violence, and they will turn out the lights in the green zone and go home.
Then the world, at least the Iraqi world, will erupt in a civil conflict, a civil war of phenomenal proportion. Those are the realities we deal with today. I hope this Senate stays on point. This is an issue that is critical to the future of our country, to the future of the free world, to the region of the Middle East, to any kind of stability we hope could be brought there.
GET A CLUE Republicans, and a backbone, and get them fast, because the path you are on today leads over a cliff, and none of us are going to like the outcome. This is not about your re-election, or who holds that damn gavel. The Donks have already rushed over that cliff… for once, don’t be the Stupid party. Don’t join them, and don’t follow them.
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