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.

Arthur Herman, in Commentary, finds defeatism shaping our outlook on the war at home.

To the student of counterinsurgency warfare, the war in Iraq has reached a critical but dismally familiar stage.

On the one hand, events in that country have taken a more hopeful direction in recent months. Operations in the city of Najaf in January presaged a more effective burden-sharing between American and Iraqi troops than in the past. The opening moves of the so-called “surge” in Baghdad, involving increased American patrols and the steady addition of more than 21,000 ground troops, have begun to sweep Shiite militias from the streets, while their leader, Moqtada al Sadr, has gone to ground. Above all, the appointment of Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the author of the U.S. Army’s latest counterinsurgency field manual, as commander of American ground forces in Iraq bespeaks the Pentagon’s conviction that what we need to confront the Iraq insurgency is not more high-tech firepower but the time-tested methods of unconventional or “fourth-generation” warfare.

In Washington, on the other hand, among the nation’s political class, the growing consensus is that the war in Iraq is not only not winnable but as good as lost—Congressman Henry Waxman of California, for one, has proclaimed that the war is lost. Politicians who initially backed the effort, like Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden, and Republican Congressmen Walter Jones and Tom Davis, have been busily backing away or out, insisting that Iraq has descended into civil war and that Americans are helpless to shape events militarily. A growing number, like Congressman John Murtha, even suggest that the American presence is making matters worse. The Democratic party has devoted much internal discussion to whether and how to restrict the President’s ability to carry out even the present counterinsurgency effort.

In short, if the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis still continues and is showing signs of improvement, the battle for the hearts and minds of Congress, or at least of the Democratic majority, seems to be all but over.

But the war is not yet lost, and a new approach to dealing with the insurgency is actually underway, and it is still possible for America to win.

on August 1, 1956, a French lieutenant colonel of Tunisian descent named David Galula had taken command of the mountainous and rebel-infested Aissa Mimoun area of Kabylia. To the FLN’s unconventional mode of warfare, Galula responded with unconventional methods of his own. These proved so successful so quickly that they were soon adopted by French commanders in other parts of Algeria. …

By January 1960, the war that many had considered lost three years earlier was virtually won.

Galula’s subsequent book, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, laid out the blueprint for success in this form of warfare. From the start, Galula had discarded the assumptions governing conventional conflicts. A decisive battlefield victory of the kind familiar from World War II, he saw, would never work against indigenous, loosely organized, but deeply committed insurgencies …

Galula grasped that the new form of warfare had reversed the conventional relationship in war between combatant and civilian. No longer bystanders or useful adjuncts to the war effort, as in World War II, civilians were the critical determinants of success or failure. Without the help or at least the passive acquiescence of the local population, the government would be doomed. In a crucial sense, it did not matter how many guerrillas were killed, or how many regular soldiers were on the ground; the center of gravity was the opinion of the local community.

Thus, the key to success lay in bringing to the surface the portion of the populace that hated the guerrillas, and then turning that minority into a majority by a combination of political, social, and cultural initiatives …

As recently as two years ago, Galula’s book was virtually unknown in Pentagon circles. Today it has become the bible of American counterinsurgency thinkers like General Petraeus.

Highly recommended. Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to John R. Finch.

Even the Washington Post draws the line at the shameful conduct of the democrat house leadership using bribes funded by the US Treasury to buy votes in favor of unconditional and irresponsible withdrawal.

TODAY THE House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill that would grant $25 million to spinach farmers in California. The legislation would also appropriate $75 million for peanut storage in Georgia and $15 million to protect Louisiana rice fields from saltwater. More substantially, there is $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fishermen, $250 million for milk subsidies, $500 million for wildfire suppression and $1.3 billion to build levees in New Orleans.

Altogether the House Democratic leadership has come up with more than $20 billion in new spending, much of it wasteful subsidies to agriculture or pork barrel projects aimed at individual members of Congress. At the tail of all of this logrolling and political bribery lies this stinger: Representatives who support the bill — for whatever reason — will be voting to require that all U.S. combat troops leave Iraq by August 2008, regardless of what happens during the next 17 months or whether U.S. commanders believe a pullout at that moment protects or endangers U.S. national security, not to mention the thousands of American trainers and Special Forces troops who would remain behind.

The Democrats claim to have a mandate from voters to reverse the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. Yet the leadership is ready to piece together the votes necessary to force a fateful turn in the war by using tactics usually dedicated to highway bills or the Army Corps of Engineers budget.

Every day there are news reports of more deaths.
Why are we still there?

We see images of death and destruction on TV every night.
Why are we still there?

We took this land by force. We occupied it. It causes us nothing but trouble.
Why are we still there?

Many of our children go there but never come back.
Why are we still there?

Murderers, Rapists, Pedophiles and Thugs enjoy celebrity status.
Why are we still there?

Their government is unstable.
Why are we still there?

Many of their people are uncivilized.
Why are we still there?

Their land is subject to natural disasters and we are obliged to come to their aid.
Why are we still there?

They have more than 1000 religious sects which we do not understand.
Why are we still there?

Their cultures, foods and diverse ways of life are unfathomable to most ordinary Americans.
Why are we still there?

They cannot secure their borders.
Why are we still there?

They are billions of dollars in debt and it will cost billions more to rebuild.
Why are we still there?

It is now quite clear!
WE MUST PULL OUT OF CALIFORNIA NOW!!!!!!!!!

The democrats are stuffing their military appropriations bill mandating withdrawal from Iraq with billions of dollars in pork to buy votes.

AP:

Democrats seeking votes for their Iraq-withdrawal plan have stuffed the bill it’s in with billions of dollars for farms, flu preparedness, New Orleans levees, home heating and other causes.

Some critics say the Democrats are simply being opportunistic — using a must-pass measure for funding U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to carry items that can’t advance as easily on their own.

At the same time, Democratic leaders are trying to increase support for setting deadlines for ending U.S. military combat in Iraq, which they’ve made part of the larger legislation.

It’s plain that Democrats are unwilling to approve the bill’s $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan without devoting considerable sums of money to the home front.

“The president wants to make sure we take care of Iraq, but I think we also have to make sure that we don’t lose sight of what we have to do here at home,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill.

Already, money in the bill not directly related to the war exceeds $20 billion.

The London Times tells us that the Pentagon is riddled with pacifists, cowards, and traitors.

Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.

Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.

“There are enough people who feel this would be an error of judgment too far for there to be resignations.”

Can you imagine the unmitigated gall of more than one US military officer confiding a lack of confidence in the elected civilian administration they are serving to foreign journalists?

Cowardice in the face of the enemy has been traditionally treated as a capital offense by the military. These generals could be court-martialed, then taken out, stood up against the wall, and shot.

But, from the point of view of the good of the service, their separation ought to be regarded as so significant a benefit that I’d even say their lives should be spared, and they should be permitted quietly to resign.