Gateway Pundit has excellent coverage of the democrats’ Senatorial surrender slumber party.

Don’t miss the 2:41 video of Joe Lieberman speaking truth to defeatism.

John Hinderaker, at Power-Line, quotes an eloquent remonstrance from John McCain to his despicable colleagues in the Senate. He titled it: A Man Addresses the Boys.

Let us keep in the front of our minds the likely consequences of premature withdrawal from Iraq. Many of my colleagues would like to believe that, should the withdrawal amendment we are currently debating become law, it would mark the end of this long effort. They are wrong. Should the Congress force a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, it would mark a new beginning, the start of a new, more dangerous, and more arduous effort to contain the forces unleashed by our disengagement.
No matter where my colleagues came down in 2003 about the centrality of Iraq to the war on terror, there can simply be no debate that our efforts in Iraq today are critical to the wider struggle against violent Islamic extremism. Already, the terrorists are emboldened, excited that America is talking not about winning in Iraq, but is rather debating when we should lose.

***

Mr. President, the terrorists are in this war to win it. The question is: Are we?

***

The supporters of this amendment respond that they do not by any means intend to cede the battlefield to al Qaeda; on the contrary, their legislation would allow U.S. forces, presumably holed up in forward operating bases, to carry out targeted counterterrorism operations. But our own military commanders say that this approach will not succeed, and that moving in with search and destroy missions to kill and capture terrorists, only to immediately cede the territory to the enemy, is the failed strategy of the past three and a half years.

***

Mr. President, this fight is about Iraq but not about Iraq alone. It is greater than that and more important still, about whether America still has the political courage to fight for victory or whether we will settle for defeat, with all of the terrible things that accompany it. We cannot walk away gracefully from defeat in this war.

What a fine leader and desirable Republican presidential candidate a reliably conservative John McCain could have made!
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I don’t agree with Harold Meyerson’s politics or his defeatist view of the situation in Iraq, but I wholeheartedly endorse his characterization of a number of Republican senators:

Anyone searching for the highest forms of invertebrate life need look no further than the floor of the U.S. Senate last week and this. These spineless specimens go by various names—Republican moderates; respected senior Republicans; Dick Lugar, John Warner, Pete Domenici, George Voinovich.

But if weak-kneed Republican bedwetters running for political cover are rightly described as invertebrate, leftist democrats who make a profession and career out of opposing their country’s cause and stabbing American troops in the back are obviously still lower on the evolutionary scale.

The Senate Majority Leader ducks a hard question.

0:36 video

And Dennis Miller has some advice for Harry Reid:

2:22 video

Hat tip to MacRanger.

Senator Joseph Lieberman agrees with Never Yet Melted on the proposition that there is no possibility that US forces can be defeated by our adversaries on the ground in Iraq, and that if the war is lost, it will be lost in the domestic war for public opinion.

He said so on Bill Bennet’s radio program. And one of the Talking Points Memo crowd captured Senator Lieberman’s radio comment and packaged it as a YouTube 0:48 video for the left blogosphere to spit and hiss over today.

mcjoan at Daily Kos typically treats Lieberman’s observation as a gratuitous attack on Harry Reid, and (naturally) proceeds to play the left’s sad old tune about the sufferings of the American soldiers they are busily stabbing in the back.

Alexander M. Haig Jr. pulls no punches in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Donald Rumsfeld’s departure and the decision to pursue counterinsurgency in Iraq required fresh commanders. But the administration overlooked a new source of military talent in, of all places, the U.S. Senate. The Senate Majority Leader, for example, asserts that the war is lost and that Gen. Petraeus is detached from reality in Baghdad. He and other equally qualified lay military experts are busily setting dates certain for troop withdrawal, oblivious of the consequences. Some have questioned the constitutionality of such Congressional resolutions. I question their wisdom. We need a debate on how to win, not how to lose. That would be a good topic for the presidential candidates. It’s certainly not what they’re talking about now.

John Quincy Adams warned us against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” and some argue that the war on terror is just such a case. I disagree. On 9/11, the monster found us asleep at home and will continue to find us inadequately prepared unless we muster more strength and more wisdom. Unless we break with illusionary democracy mongering, inept handling of our military resources and self-defeating domestic political debates, we are in danger of becoming our own worst enemy.

And when domestic defeatism forces US withdrawal, and the religious fanatics spill oceans of innocent blood, the leftwing punditocracy will explain it is all the fault of George W. Bush for disturbing the peaceful idyll of Baathist dictatorship.

Christopher J. Fettweis puts America on the couch for a session of (slightly premature) Post-traumatic Iraq Syndrome counseling in the La Times.

Losing hurts more than winning feels good. This simple maxim applies with equal power to virtually all areas of human interaction: sports, finance, love. And war. ...

The endgame in Iraq is now clear, in outline if not detail, and it appears that the heavily favored United States will be upset. Once support for a war is lost, it is gone for good; there is no example of a modern democracy having changed its mind once it turned against a war. So we ought to start coming to grips with the meaning of losing in Iraq.

The consequences for the national psyche are likely to be profound, throwing American politics into a downward spiral of bitter recriminations the likes of which it has not seen in a generation. ...

The American people seem to understand, however — and historians will certainly agree — that the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation. The Bush administration was operating under an international political illusion, one that is further discredited with every car bombing of a crowded Baghdad marketplace and every Iraqi doctor who packs up his family and flees his country.

The only significant question still hanging is whether Iraq will turn out to have been the biggest strategic mistake in U.S. history. ...

Perhaps at some point we will come to recognize that the United States can afford to be much more restrained in its foreign policy adventures. Were our founding fathers here, they would surely look on Iraq with horror and judge that the nation they created had fundamentally lost its way. If the war in Iraq leads the United States to return to its traditional, restrained grand strategy, then perhaps the whole experience will not have been in vain.

Either way, the Iraq syndrome is coming. We need to be prepared for the divisiveness, vitriol, self-doubt and recrimination that will be its symptoms. They will be the defining legacy of the Bush administration and neoconservatism’s parting gift to America.

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Thank you, Neocons, for returning the USA to the grand old pre-WWII philosophy of Isolationism.
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It seems curious to this reader that Mr. Fettweis, an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, in his eagerness to snatch defeat, never actually identifies when and where the US defeat occurred.

Where exactly did the American Blenheim, the American Retreat from Moscow, the American Stalingrad, or the American Dien Bien Phu take place and when did it occur?

Traditionally, nations lose wars when they suffer a major defeat in battle resulting in the destruction or surrender of an entire army.

Alternatively, nations lose wars the way the Confederacy did in 1865 and Germany did in WWI via drastic prolonged losses of manpower, economic exhaustion, and civilian starvation.

We lost 3513 men in Iraq over four years, not the 10-13 thousand Grant lost at Cold Harbor, the 100,000 each France and Germany lost at Verdun, not even the 7000 we lost in less than a month at Iwo Jima.

It can hardly be contended that the loss of 3500 men over four years has brought a nation of 300 million to its knees. The United States lost 3% of its population in the Civil War before one side lost the will to continue the fight. Germany lost more than 1,700,000 in WWI before accepting the Armistice. We lose 26,000 lives in highway fatalities per annum, and we’re not withdrawing from the nation’s roads.

We are obviously not really running out of manpower. Have we exhausted our financial resources?

We’re running a deficit, it’s true, but the deficit as percentage of GDP is low: 1.4%. The average since 1970 is 2.3%.

We haven’t lost any battles. No US army has been annihilated or surrendered. We are hardly running out of manpower. We are neither starving, nor broke. So why are we defeated?

What we are running out of is conviction in the justness of our cause and confidence in our success. Those losses did not occur in Iraq. Those losses were inflicted on the homefront in a highly successful propaganda operation which inflicted the death of a thousand cuts upon American support for the War in Iraq by lovingly detailed news coverage of every American casualty, by the systematic magnification of the enemy’s every trivial ambush or booby trap into a major victory, by the obfuscation and denigration of America’s causus belli and war aims.

American military forces cannot possibly be defeated on the battlefield by the inferior numbers of lightly armed irregular adversaries. But we have been brought very close to defeat, with withdrawal not difficult to imagine, by domestic defeatism and treason.

Before Mr. Fettweis undertakes to talk about Post-Traumatic Defeat Syndrome, he is under an obligation to identify the real character of that defeat.

Unidentified “US officials” leak to Britain’s Guardian.

Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.

“Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it’s a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces,” a senior US official in Baghdad warned. “They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]. ...

US officials now say they have firm evidence that Tehran has switched tack as it senses a chance of victory in Iraq. In a parallel development, they say they also have proof that Iran has reversed its previous policy in Afghanistan and is now supporting and supplying the Taliban’s campaign against US, British and other Nato forces.

Tehran’s strategy to discredit the US surge and foment a decisive congressional revolt against Mr Bush is national in scope and not confined to the Shia south, its traditional sphere of influence, the senior official in Baghdad said. It included stepped-up coordination with Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Syrian-backed Sunni Arab groups and al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, he added. Iran was also expanding contacts across the board with paramilitary forces and political groups, including Kurdish parties such as the PUK, a US ally.

David Broder, in today’s Washington Post, claims the left has a mandate for defeat, surrender, and withdrawal.

The gap between public opinion and Washington reality has rarely been wider than on the issue of the Iraq war. A clear national mandate is being blocked—for now—by constraints that make sense only in the short-term calculus of politics in this capital city.

The public verdict on the war is plain. Large majorities have come to believe that it was a mistake to go in, and equally large majorities want to begin the process of getting out. That is what the polls say; it is what the mail to Capitol Hill says; and it is what voters signaled when they put the Democrats back into control of Congress in November. ...

The question that naturally arises is why the strongly expressed judgment of the people—responding to news of increasing American casualties in a seemingly intractable sectarian conflict—cannot be translated into action in Washington. ...

One way or another, public opinion ultimately will be heeded on the war in Iraq. It is hard to imagine the Republicans going into the presidential election of 2008 with 150,000 American troops still taking heavy casualties in Iraq.

It’s true that the democrats won control of Congress last November, but many other issues and factors besides the war, and a number of Republican scandals, undoubtedly also played a role in that election’s results. The democrats gained a very narrow Congressional majority, and can hardly be described as possessing a mandate to do anything other than avoid taking bribes and molesting pages.

Which mandate alone should represent a more than adequate challenge, requiring all the moral resolve and political will the democrat party can possibly muster, if not more.

One hears the claim a lot these days that public opinion thinks this, and public opinion demands that, as if opinion polls conducted by news organizations represented some sort of meaningful, objective, binding, and official process. This sort of claim represents the grossest sort of attempt by journalists to usurp political authority.

The poll Mr. Broder cites in his own editorial was conducted by two notoriously biased news organizations, the Washington Post and ABC News. And its results are based on the responses of a mere 1082 adults, including an intentional “oversample of African-Americans.”

Opinion polls of 1000 or so of the people willing to talk to pollsters on the phone prove basically nothing. Opinion polls are typically artfully crafted. The questions they contain steer answers in the direction their creators desire.

That WaPo/ABC poll, which Broder cited, asked:

Do you think (the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored there, even if that means continued U.S. military casualties); OR, do you think (the United States should withdraw its military forces from Iraq in order to avoid further U.S. military casualties, even if that means civil order is not restored there)?

But if I asked instead:

Do you think (the United States should abandon the civilian population of Iraq to Islamic Fundamentalism and sectarian violence, if that means destroying our future credibility in the eyes of both our friends and our adversaries abroad): OR, do you think (the United States should keep its word and implant stable and democratic government in Iraq, even at the cost of US military casualties)?

the poll results would be quite different.

Mr. Broder’s polls never can produce anything resembling a mandate. They only represent propaganda, typically created by dishonest and dishonorable advocates.

The only opinion polls which count occur officially and in November. The last election was inconclusive, as are the war’s current results.

Members of the left and its allies in the punditocracy looking for a mandate for surrender, withdrawal, and defeat need to look for it in the results of the 2008 election, and stop claiming that they already possess it.

AP:

President Bush vetoed legislation to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq Tuesday night in a historic showdown with Congress …

Bush signed the veto with a pen given to him by Robert Derga, the father of Marine Corps Reserve Cpl. Dustin Derga, who was killed in Iraq on May 8, 2005. The elder Derga spoke with Bush two weeks ago at a meeting the president had with military families at the White House.

Derga asked Bush to promise to use the pen in his veto. On Tuesday, Derga contacted the White House to remind Bush to use the pen, and so he did. The 24-year-old Dustin Derga served with Lima Company, 3rd Battalion 25th Marines from Columbus, Ohio. The five-year Marine reservist and fire team leader was killed by an armor-piercing round in Anbar Province.

Hat tip to Jules Crittenden.

Terrye reflects on the liberals’ commitment to bringing about American defeat.

There is a commercial I have seen in which some old baby boomer sitting in a fancy office says he is going to use some service {I forget what it is} so that he can stick it to the man. His young assistant says But sir, you are the man. To which the old boy responds, Maybe.

I think liberals have found themselves in a world in which they are the man. They are the people running the World Bank with all of its phenomenal corruption. They are the people responsible for the United Nations with its corruption and incompetence on display every day. They are the people who railed against the likes of Saddam Hussein for years, only to rail against the United States even more. The truth is if they have to choose between the leader of the free world, the President of the United States and some tin pot dictator with a swiss bank account…they are more than likely to choose the dictator.

For years, they played the rebellious teenager speaking truth to power and now they find they are the power. And guess what? They are no better than the other guy. That is what is eating at them. They know they can’t reason with the Iranians or the Syrians or people like Hugo Chavez or that nutcase in North Korea. They have shown time and again that all they can do is declare defeat and demand reform. They are good at the defeat part, after all it is some other poor bastard who is sitting out on that limb they are sawing off, but the reform part…not so good. They will spend a lot more time complaining about Wolfowitz than they will the 800 billion lost to corruption at the World Bank. After all, if they go after the Mugabes of the world they will lose the support of those dictators. Better to let them line their pockets and pretend not to notice the kickbacks. Just blame the poverty on capitalism and free trade and ignore the obvious thievery.

They will not demand anyone go to jail over the Food for Oil scandal even though it made a mockery of the United Nations, an institution they show reverence for. No, they will go suck up to Assad and pretend he did not kill the political opposition in Lebanon. They will turn their back on democracy in Iraq. They will whine about the Patriot Act, but they will demand we talk to the Mad Mullahs who are proud of the fact that they publicly execute women of ill repute. They will worry over global warming and the supposed end of the world, but they will not deal with the threats that face us in the here and now. They don’t know how.

The Democrats woke up in the world of the 21st century and discovered they are the man. And all they know how to do is bitch. And while bitching might be fun, it doesn’t fix a damn thing.

Corporal Tyler Rock USMC to Senator Harry Reid courtesy of Pat Dollard.

yeah and i got a quote for that douche harry reid. these families need us here. obviously he has never been in iraq. or at least the area worth seeing. the parts where insurgency is rampant and the buildings are blown to pieces. we need to stay here and help rebuild. if iraq didnt want us here then why do we have IP’s voluntering everyday to rebuild their cities. and working directly with us too. same with the IA’s. it sucks that iraqi’s have more patriotism for a country that has turned to complete shit more than the people in america who drink starbucks everyday. we could leave this place and say we are sorry to the terrorists. and then we could wait for 3,000 more american civilians to die before we say “hey thats not nice” again. and the sad thing is after we WIN this war. people like him will say he was there for us the whole time.

Mark Levin argues.

Harry Reid… by word and action is actively undermining our fighting men and women in Iraq. His legislative efforts to starve our armed forces in the middle of a war are as contemptible as anything I’ve witnessed in my 25 years in Washington. And yesterday he made a statement that was so disgraceful and brazen that it could have been uttered by Tokyo Rose during World War II or Jane Fonda during the Vietnam War. The difference, of course, is that Reid is the highest ranking Democrat in the United States Senate.

For those who are so pre-occupied with Gonzales that they may not have heard it, this is what Reid said yesterday: “I believe … that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week.”

So, Reid announces to our brave volunteers that their country is sending them to a lost war. And he announces to our enemy that victory is within their reach — just keep up the killing a little longer. During my radio show last night, I received a call from a Gold Star father. He was outraged by Reid’s comment. He has called before and has become a good friend. But I’ve never heard him as angry and frustrated as he was last night.

Rather than join the chorus demanding Gonzales’s resignation, let me be the first to demand Reid’s resignation. And let’s see how many pundits, conservative and otherwise, will join me.

He’s dead right.

Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.

The leftwing Canadian reporter on American legal affairs for Stale magazine Dahlia Lithwick, in contributing her own little bit to the MSM-fabricated “8 Fired US Attorneys” scandal, recorded what she considered a grand bon mot for that embarassment-to-the-Republic Richard Durbin.

Right before we break for lunch in Alberto Gonzales’ star turn before the Senate judiciary committee, he repeats, for about the fifth time, some crazy hokum about how anyone who criticizes the actions of the Justice Department folks involved in the recent unpleasantness is in fact “attacking the career professionals.” At which point Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., about loses it. “That’s like saying anyone who disagrees with the president’s policy on the war is attacking the soldiers,” he bellows.

No, Dick, it’s more like saying politicians on the homefront (like you) trying to negate the goal of the efforts and sacrifices of US soldiers fighting a war are stabbing them in the back.

AFP:

The war in Iraq “is lost” and a US troop surge is failing to bring peace to the country, the leader of the Democratic majority in the US Congress, Harry Reid, said Thursday.

“I believe … that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week,” Reid said, on the same day US President George W. Bush was giving a speech at an Ohio town hall meeting defending the war on terror.

At the First Battle of Manassas, it is reported that General Barnard Bee, whose troops were beginning to break under the attack of superior Union forces, informed General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, “General, sir, the day is going against us,” to which Jackson replied: “If you think so, sir, you had better not say anything about it.”

Jackson kept his brigade standing there steady (like a stone wall), then attacked with the bayonet and won the day.

If Harry Reid had been commanding the First Virginia Brigade at the First Battle of Manassas, the American Civil War would have been very short.

Jules Crittenden wonders: why bother anymore?

I don’t know about you, but I’m about ready to pack it in.

I placed my own life on the line in this cause, and know others who have died for it.

The assault on Baghdad on April 7, 2003, was not my first combat action, but that day I went expecting to die and leave my children orphans. I did it because I thought it was worth something. Other young men and women were willing to die, and if I died with them, my wife knew what to tell our kids: “This is how you live your life. Doing the most that you can do. Moving forward. Standing up for what you believe in. Standing with others. Recognizing it can cost you your life.”

But America doesn’t want this anymore, the pollsters and the opposition pols tell us.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives is unilaterally treating with the enemy, providing our enemy an opportunity to divide and conquer. She is doing so in a manner unprecedented in American history. In the past, partisanship didn’t always stop at the water’s edge, it sometimes waded in. But until now it never took such a humiliating bath as the one we’ve just witnessed.

We are facing, among our myriad enemies, an old one. And we have just, with a once-stalwart, now-wavering ally’s help, reaffirmed the validity of Iran’s terrorist policies. Taking hostages apparently will not only go unpunished, it will be rewarded. Propaganda coups, humiliation and the release of a suspected Iranian agent. Fifteen Royal Navy swabs and Royal Marines who were taken without a fight are deemed more important than tens of thousands of combat troops, British and American, fighting and dying every day. Tell me, before I turn my back on this, that Iran has not yet received its final answer in this matter.

Because I’m looking at all this and saying, maybe it is time to pack it in. Forget the phased withdrawal plan, just get out. Iraq and the Middle East be damned. Nothing new about living with genocide, when it’s happening at a convenient distance. We managed to pretend as a nation we didn’t have Southeast Asia’s blood on our hands after we bolted from there. We can do it again.

Iraq may become a base for terrorists who want to attack us. That will be George Bush’s fault, and we’ll deal with them as we should have all along. As a police problem.

Iran’s mad mullahs may come to dominate the Middle East and develop their nuclear weapons, but there’s not really much we can do about that. Not without someone getting hurt.

Maybe it’s time to pack it in on our pretensions of world leadership entirely.

Let’s relinquish the seat on the United Nations Security Council and join the European Union. Europe does so many things so much better than us, anyway. Socialized medicine, cradle-to-grave welfare, maintaining good relations with despotic regimes, avoiding responsibility and being admired for it.

Anyway, Europe will need somewhere to flee to as it crumbles, and our great oceans provide a great illusion of security. EU membership will expedite that. If it opens the third-world floodgates and requires us to honor Sharia law, well, it will take time before those things destroy us the way they are destroying Europe. Not our generation’s problem, is it?

Read the whole thing.