You'd think that President Bush's allies in the Senate would get the hint of showing a united front after hearing his Memorial Day speech before a crowd of our brave servicemen at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania as well as his most recent speech at Elmendorf AFB in Alaska where he noted that now is not the time for our leaders in Congress to go wobbly on the War on Terror or broadcast a image of a divided or weakened nation by calling for troop withdrawals or demeaning the White House's strategy on Iraq. Well it seems that the Republican Senate has demonstrated its slow drift into the defeatist/isolationistic mindset much like the pre WWII Congress or even the Pelosi/Kerry/Dean/Kennedy crowd with today's 79-19 vote passage of a resolution calling on the President to set 2006 as a time to in which the US should have a significant transfer of sovereignty to the Iraq government in the regard to security. So what the Senate has done is passed a resolution, which doesn't specifically state a withdrawal date or a timetable to get out of Iraq but in reality it has set 2006 as some goal-line to cross. So I guess if we don't get things done before that magic date of 2006 (It's funny how things revolve around elections) then we'll just take our toys and go home and let G-d (or in Iraq's case Allah) to sort things out.
What these Senator's need to do is ignore all those crazy polls and the continued drumbeat of "Get out Now" being pushed by the anti-war left or the media and stand up for the troops who are putting their lives on the line everyday to destroy the forces of Islamic terrorism. If they don't take a principled stand by getting behind our armed forces and supporting them in "finishing the drill" in the current battlefront in Iraq. Until our forces and our Iraqi allies have beaten the terrorists/insurgents to a pulp in the streets and territories of Iraq, we can't start talking about setting up deadlines. A counter-terror/insurgency battle is not and never will be like a road project or the production schedule of some product from a corporation like Ford, IBM, or Microsoft. You'd think that these leaders in the Senate and the House would have learned this, what with the results that we had in Vietnam when Congress cut off funding and support to our brave soldiers battling in the jungles. (In fact, the US soldiers were actually achieving positive results in Vietnam under the command of Gen. Creighton Abrams even when the US Congress was cutting off funds. See here, here, here, here, here. Let's not repeat the same mistakes today that we made during the Vietnam War. There's no time to do things half-way when it comes to securing Iraq from the terrorists/insurgents that are raising hell in Iraq. We can all have an opinion about the war but we are in a fight for the survival of the West and the rest of the World from the Islamic terrorists before they spread their wings and kill more innocent people much like they did on 9-11 or most recently in Amman, Jordan.
While the Senators who voted for the resolution will go on T.V. tonight and claim that this vote is their way of ensuring that the war progresses towards a successful end, they have actually broadcast to our enemies that if they just hold out until 2006 the US will high tail it out of the region and leave the Iraqi government fully exposed in its infancy. Thankfully we have some 19 souls in the Senate who stood on principle and voted against this horrific message of defeatism. If we want to honor the 2,000 plus soldiers who have died serving the nation in Iraq, then we should follow the lead of Republican Senators Bunning, Burr, Chambliss, Coburn, DeMint, Graham, Inhofe, Isakson, Kyl, McCain, Sessions, Thune, and Vitt who voted nay on the resolution. The know what's at stake and are well aware how much our Commander-in-Chief and our troops need our undying vigilance and steely posture. John McCain pretty much identified that this resolution is yet another clear message of defeatism rather than a complete committment to achieving a total victory, when he noted on the Senate floor:
"If we can reach victory in 2006, that would be wonderful," Mr. McCain said. "But should 2006 not be the landmark year that these amendments anticipate, we will have once again unrealistically raised the expectations of the American people that can only cost domestic support for America's role in this conflict, a war we must win."So give me leaders who speak with principle and paint with bold colors over those "finger in the wind" politicos who prefer to paint with light pastels any day.
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