United for Victory

Fire of Liberty

Brendan Minter has a great piece over at OpinionJournal on how Representative Murtha's call for our troops to start a complete withdrawal from Iraq within the next six months has actually put some fire in the belly of the Republican leadership thus pulling them out their light slumber. In fact the Republican's decided to call the Pennsylvanian congressman's bluff and presented the House with a resolution that called for the immediate withdrawal. Instead of peeling off the Republican party moderates, the proposed resolution brought the GOP together and resulted in being rejected by a 403-3 vote thus demonstrating the Democrats and the country as a whole isn't quite ready to return to the pre-WWII days of isolationistic "Fortress America," with our current fight in Iraq. Minter pretty much summed up what's at stake in winning the battle in Iraq and feels the Republicans have finally wrapped their hands around the whole situation when he noted:

Anyone who thinks that vote was simply cheap political theater and not connected to the larger debate on how to fight the war on terror hasn't been watching Mr. Hunter and the other defense hawks in the House over the past four years. It's not an accident that the House hasn't passed the "torture ban" that John McCain and John Warner pushed through the Senate. Nor is it a coincidence that intelligence reform stalled in the House last year until it was amended to insure that troops in the field would still have the intelligence they need.

It's not lost on Mr. Hunter, or on Reps. Steve Buyer, John Kline and many others, that Iraq is the most visible front in the war on terror and is therefore a symbol for whether the political elites of this nation have what it takes to confront global terrorist networks. If politicians can't stomach going after terrorists who openly attack U.S. soldiers, they won't have what it takes to go after terrorists who hide in some of the most remote or ungoverned reaches of the world.

It should now be clear--if it wasn't already--that the Democratic Party is the party of withdrawal. Had John Kerry won the election last year, the U.S. would today be packing its bags and preparing to leave Iraq under something similar to the Murtha plan. The fallout from that would be disastrous. "Rapid reaction force" or not, Iraq would descend into political chaos and then perhaps fall under the power of a dictator. Maybe Saddam Hussein himself would return, though there is no shortage of Saddam wannabes in that part of the world. Following that, no U.S. president for a generation or maybe two would have the political muscle to topple a rogue regime anywhere. In the meantime, the U.S. would be on the run, while terrorists and the dictators who nurture them would have the upper hand.

It's about darn time that the GOP finally gets the whole understanding of how it's winning Iraq is a "now or never" event that will determine our success or failure in the Global War on Islamic Terrorism. The Repulicans have to take the Jessie Ventura's often quoted saying "I ain't got time to bleed," to heart on keep up the united effort of winning the epic struggle against the "barbarians at the gate."