Democrats: Iraq plan, the remix

Congressman Jack Murtha failed miserably when he sought to surprise everyone (and his own party) by throwing an Iraq plan together without telling anyone. His idea takes a good deal of decision-making power out of the hands of the military and the President, and puts it in Congress' hands. Because most rational Democrats realized this policy was doomed for utter failure and would have meant disaster for our troops on the ground, CNN reports: House Democrats try again on Iraq

House Democrats on Wednesday continued to work on a compromise plan for the Iraq war that would try to bridge differences within the party after backing away from legislation that would set conditions on war funding.

Instead of debating the war this week, the chamber will complete a homeland security bill that implements the recommendations of the 9/11 commission.

Some Democrats say:

Senate Democrats on the left who voted against the war in 2002 say they will not support any measure that backs an Iraq mission.

"I'm not going to go for something that says, 'OK, here's a new mission, we're going to authorize this,' " said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin. "I want to get us out of there."

Others say:

On the other side of the spectrum, some moderate Democrats in the Senate told CNN they are not comfortable with passing something that doesn't have bipartisan support and are unsure about supporting something that looks like Congress micromanaging the war.

On the face of it, the average observer may think the Democrats have decided on tactical retreat; knowing they could not agree even amongst themselves, it was better to watch and wait for the war to get worse (which they believe is inevitable). These Democrats (and some Republicans) may be waiting a long time. Since the surge has begun, attacks have been down sharply in Iraq.

Rather, beyond lacking votes for their micromanagement bill, and beyond the newfound stability on the ground in Iraq, Democrats may have realized a few things. For one, they should stick to their strengths, such as the issues that got them elected: Domestic issues. Ethics reform. The environment.

Secondly, Democrats surely realize that one reason they were divided amongst themselves was... their arguments for withdrawal hold no water. Worse, still - the arguments for staying in Iraq and fighting are so much stronger.

For example, Max Boot's Going it alone because we have to powerfully lays out the recent history of U.S. and allied armed conflicts, and further documents American's hegemony:

TONY BLAIR'S decision to withdraw 1,600 troops from Iraq is understandable.
The prime minister had to make a difficult decision about where to allocate
Britain's scarce resources...

The tragedy is that he had to rob Peter to pay Paul because Britain can't
maintain 7,000 troops in Iraq and 7,000 in Afghanistan. Those are hardly huge numbers for a country of 60 million with the fifth-largest national economy in the world. Yet even as Britain has continued to play a leading role in world affairs, it has allowed its defenses to molder.

The total size of its armed forces has shrunk from 305,800 in 1990 to 195,900 today, leaving it No. 28 in the world, behind Eritrea and Burma. This downsizing
has reduced the entire British army (107,000 soldiers) to almost half the size of the U.S. Marine Corps (175,000). Storied regiments such as the Black Watch and the Royal Scots, with histories stretching back centuries, have been eliminated.

Britain is hardly alone in its unilateral disarmament. A similar trend can be discerned among virtually all of the major U.S. allies, aside from Japan. Canada is a particularly poignant case in point. At the end of World War II, Canada had more than a million men under arms and operated the world's third-biggest navy (behind the U.S. and Britain), with more than 400 ships. Today, it has all of 62,000 personnel on active duty, and its navy has just 19 warships and 23 support vessels, making it one-fourth the size of the U.S. Coast Guard.

The primary culprit is declining defense spending among U.S. allies. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, defense budgets among NATO members, excluding the U.S., have fallen from 2.49% of gross domestic product in 1993 to 1.8% of GDP in 2005. Britain is actually above the norm, spending 2.3% of GDP, or $52 billion, on defense. Canada, with a defense budget of $13 billion, is below the norm, at 1.1%.

But all those expenditures fade into insignificance by comparison with the U.S., which spends $495 billion a year, or 4% of the world's largest GDP, on its armed forces. That's more than the rest of NATO combined, even though the other countries have, in aggregate, greater demographic and economic resources. Unless the other NATO members are willing to step up their spending — and what are the odds of that? — there is scant chance that their gripes about American unilateralism will ever be rectified. We act alone, or almost alone, not out of choice but out of necessity.

Boot makes a number of excellent points. But Democrats may also feel besieged from what they may think are traditional bastions of anti-war thinking. TimesWatch reports: Another Times Reporter Goes on Rose Show and Says Bush's "Surge" May Work

Here's an excerpt from Sabrina Tavernise's lead-off interview with Charlie Rose :

"It's surprising, I know, because it seems like such -- you know, such an unmitigated sadness and tragedy for a lot of people -- you know, for the nation, for the people there, but, you know, it's really – it's really true that if you held an election tomorrow and you asked every single Iraqi, are you -- would you do it again? Would you have the U.S. do it again? You'd have close to 80 percent of the population, which is the Shiites and the Kurds, saying yes, they should.

"When you say work -- I think that the surge could definitely have an effect, a good effect, in the neighborhoods for bringing violence down. I think it could. I mean, I studied a number of different neighborhoods where the mere presence of American troops actually did bring down the murder rate. In one particular example, by about a third, which is significant, you know, significant. It's a lot of bodies that aren't turning up in sewers every morning. So that's not small.

She sums it up:

"I think that American soldiers have a very important function in Iraq right now. I think that -- that if everyone left immediately, it would be an unmitigated disaster."

Words like these, echoed from the lips of a New York Times reporter, do not bode well for the Democrats' Iraq pullout hopes. The time has come for those who believe the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, which I believe it was, to open their mind to the facts on the groun. America is not losing in Iraq. The reality of the war does not support inflammatory rhetoric which is embellished by staunch anti-war advocates.

Both left and right want America to prosper. Let's start by helping America win in Iraq.