Is anyone else tired of being called impractical for wanting the U.S. military out of Iraq? Now, I don’t think I am impractical. I haven’t called for ‘no residual forces’ and have even fought back against what I considered an overly dogmatic and inflexible strategy from the ‘no residual forces’ crew at Moveon.org and OpenLeft.com. But that is not because I think we should have residual forces…it’s because I don’t think the issue is ultimately that important. What’s important is that we concede mission failure and begin the process of leaving. So, I don’t need to hear this crap:
“I think they’re actually counterproductive. They don’t seem very thoughtful,” said Republican Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who opposed President Bush’s troop increase this year but wants any troop withdrawals to be based on benchmarks of progress in Iraq rather than a timetable. Democratic Rep. Zack Space, a freshman who will be up for re-election in a Republican-leaning part of Ohio next year, said of the antiwar groups, “By embracing a kind of impractical view of the situation, I think they hurt their cause.”
Here is the bottom line reality. No matter how many times the Democrats say that we don’t have the Republican votes to end the war, it still is not true. We don’t have the Democratic will to refuse the president any more money. If we want to talk about impracticality, we should focus on the real issue. How do you force the president to plan for and implement a withdrawal? It’s the planning part that is bogging us down. No one wants to force an end to the war by simply denying the president troops and money if it is not accompanied by comprehensive planning. On the other hand, a strategy of simply waiting out the end of the president’s term is not going to go down well with the public.
We can see the problem in the following. The Dems want us to focus on the Republicans, the sympathetic Republicans want us to settle for toothless legislation, and the anti-war movement has already tried and failed to move Republicans into our camp.
But that isn’t why the movement to end the Iraq War has failed to gain more traction in Congress, according to Democratic lawmakers and outside analysts of the movement. Instead, they say, it’s because the groups simply have won all the Democratic votes they’re going to get. The only place to pick up more votes, at least for the next year, is on the Republican side.
And the only means for accomplishing that, it seems, is for the anti-war groups to reach out more emphatically to Republicans who have expressed doubts about the war in search of a compromise that could win their votes while keeping almost all the Democrats in the fold. “What was always missing, and continues to elude us, is the 10 to 12 Republicans who will come over to our side and help us break the logjam,” said Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, one of the sponsors of the legislation to set a timetable to withdraw troops. “If there were any missing energy” in the anti-war movement, he said, “that might be where they could apply it.”
…One group that did try to negotiate with swing-vote Republicans ended up with little to show for its efforts. Last month, Vote Vets, an organization of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, sent 40 members to Capitol Hill to try to persuade Senate Republicans to vote for the Webb amendment. Many Republicans were receptive, said Peter Granato, a vice chairman of the organization, but they still voted against it after one of their most respected colleagues, Republican John W. Warner of Virginia, reversed his earlier position and opposed the idea.
In other words, we got nowhere working with Republicans and we have no other option than to request that Democrats take more drastic steps. The Republicans are intransigent in the face of annihilation, so what could possibly move them at this point? They keep suggesting that if we would only be less partisan they would reach out, but there is no evidence of that. Like Sen. John Warner, they allows pull the football away at the last second.
You know what is impractical? The idea that another 15 months in Iraq chasing our tails will leave our country stronger is impractical.
