AP reports: House votes to “support troops,” but opposes sending additional troops to complete the mission.

Hat tip to Roger de Hauteville at Maggie’s Farm.

Investors Business Daily condemns the House democrat leadership’s “slow bleed” strategy

As chairman of the House panel that oversees military spending, (John) Murtha plans to advance legislation next month attaching strings to the additional war funds Bush requested on Feb. 5.

Murtha plans to stop the Iraq War by placing four conditions on combat funds through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. The Pentagon would have to certify that troops being sent to Iraq are “fully combat ready” with training and equipment, troops must have at least one year at home between combat deployments, combat deployments cannot be longer than a year, and extending tours of duty would be prohibited…

It’s not that the Democrats think we’re losing or that the war is unwinnable. They simply don’t want to win it. As House Minority Leader John Boehner said of Murtha’s proposals: “While American troops are fighting radical Islamic terrorists thousands of miles away, it is unthinkable that the United States Congress would move to discredit their mission, cut off their reinforcements and deny them the resources they need to succeed and return home safely.”..

Neville Chamberlain’s naivete may have helped bring on World War II, but at least he supported his country when war began. Norway’s Vidkun Quisling and France’s Vichy government under Marshal Petain may have collaborated with the Nazi enemy, but after their countries’ defeats, not before.

We’d have to go back to Benedict Arnold to find Americans as eager as Murtha & Co. to see an American defeat on the battlefield.

Read the whole thing.

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But Robert Farley argues that these kinds of accusations have serious implications.

IBD seems to be claiming that the vast bulk of the Democratic Party (and no small part of the Republican) are the equivalent of the most notable traitor in American history, a man who undoubtedly would have been hanged or shot if he had been caught. The editorial has been linked to approvingly by Captain’s Quarters, Powerline (sic), Instapundit, and the Gateway Pundit. Reynolds further notes:

To some people, Vietnam wasn’t a defeat, but a victory. To them, the right side won. And lost. Naturally, they’re happy to repeat the experience.

Undoubtedly, the Perfesser and his ilk will claim that they aren’t actually calling for treason trials and executions of members of the Democratic Party. But why not? If Democrats really are the equivalent of Benedict Arnold, and if opposition to the war and the Surge is traitorous, then why shouldn’t we be tried and executed, or at least imprisoned? The rhetoric leads only one place. Either Glenn Reynolds believes that Democrats are traitors, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, he should tell us why, and should explain why he so often suggests that Democrats have committed treasonable offenses. If he does believe that Democrats are traitors, then he ought to step up and start calling for arrests. Treason is a capital offense; there’s not really a middle ground. We’re guilty, or we’re not.

Sadly, but perhaps fortunately, Reynolds et al are too gutless to pursue the logical consequence of their accusation. So far, anyway..

The problem is that the current administration has tried to make war while neglecting this particular line of logic. America’s Vietnam experience demonstrated the capacity of the radical peace movement to use its relations with the academic clerisy and the media to turn treason and defeatism into a de rigeur fashion statement of membership in the American elite.

During WWI and WII, the wars which America won during the last century, preaching defeatism and rendering aid and comfort to the enemy were simply not tolerated.

The US Government has the obligation to the members of its armed forces whom it sends into harm’s way to prevent their service and sacrifices being made futile by the domestic demoralization of the American public by a defeatist minority of radical leftists and pacifists.

Too cowardly to take an open stand insisting upon American defeat and withdrawal, which might have political consequences, the democrat leadership in the House of Representatives has devised a strategy in which John Murtha, now Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee, will bring to bear the same low cunning which served him so well during theAbscam investigation, when he declined to accept a bribe (while being taped) “at this point.”

At this point, Murtha will not try to defund the US military effort in Iraq, he will simply attach a variety of restrictions on spending and troop deployments, threatening Republicans with a complete cutoff of funds if they try to oppose such restrictions.

The Politico reports:

new restrictions on how the president can deploy combat forces from the United States to Iraq, allow combat veterans to have at least one year stateside before returning to the frontlines and prevent the Pentagon from keeping soldiers and Marines already in Iraq in uniform after their enlistments expire.

“This vote will limit the options of the president and should stop the surge,” Murtha predicted of next month’s floor fight over the wartime supplemental appropriation. “We’re trying to force redeployment [of troops outside Iraq], not by taking money away but by redirecting it.”

Murtha is not pushing a total cutoff of funds for the war in Iraq…

The strategy being employed by Murtha and other House Democratic leaders would force Bush and Republican congressional leaders to accept the new troop restrictions, or face the possibility the supplemental spending bill would falter, thus cutting off all funding for the war.

Democrats are betting that Bush and the Republicans won’t take that risk and will go along with the Democratic proposals. And Republican leaders are not taking Murtha’s threats lightly.

The democrats in the House of Representatives, and a disgraceful handful of soi disant Republicans, are supporting the following disgraceful Resolution, specifically crafted to allow lawmakers to “support the troops” and to lend aid and comfort to the enemy at the same time.

Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq;

and Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush announced on January 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq.

Let’s hope that real Republicans in these people’s home districts remember their names in 2008.

From Dr. Sanity:

All politicians are guilty of trying to hedge their bets when they can get away with it. But the rhetoric employed by the Dems has consistently rested on US failure and defeat because it plays well to their leftist base, who have bet their entire ideology on America’s defeat and humilitation.

The Democrat’s dilemma is that they can’t possibly win an election with only that base, so they have to pander to the patriotic Americans just enough not to alienate them completely. Clearly, from their perspective, it would be best if America surrendered and admitted defeat. That would be the best possible outcome. They could keep their lunatic anti-American, anti-Bush, base; and win over those disgusted that the Republicans and Bush managed to lose a war and sacrifice American lives for nothing. But, oh dear. What if things turn around. People will remember any definitive action they implemented to impede success…. So, best to not actually do anything and just talk about doing something and see how things play out. If they took simultaneously committed to both the rhetoric and obvious behavior to ensure a path to surrender– and then that nincompoop Bush managed yet again to pull things out of the fire, they would be DOA in 2008.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Maggies Farm.

One of my classmates today quoted veteran New Yorker political commentator Elizabeth Drew writing in the New York Review of Books:

Almost everyone in Washington understands, even if they don’t say it, that there is no real solution to what now seems to be the most disastrous foreign policy decision in American history. It’s now a matter of how to bring America’s involvement to an end with the fewest bad consequences. Despite all the studies and reports and amendments, events in Iraq itself will likely define the outcome.

US deaths in Iraq have amounted to 3064 over nearly four years.

Grant’s attack at Cold Harbor, June 3, 1864, which cost the lives of 10,000 Union soldiers (from a population of 26 million) in twenty minutes was a disaster. The loss of three thousand citizens of a nation of 300 million, a country which loses 26,000 lives annually in traffic accidents, over the course of nearly four years is something very different from Cold Harbor.

Iraq has not been a military disaster. US forces have suffered no battlefield defeat. Our troops are not demoralized. And there is no possibility whatsoever of our enemies achieving victory by military means.

Their only hope for victory, for bringing about the disaster of US withdrawal which has not yet occurred, is via the cowardice, defeatism, and disloyalty of our own chattering class elite.

Daniel Pipes notes that contemporary vulnerabilities could possibly cancel out the West’s advantages in military forces and technology.

After defeating fascists and communists, can the West now defeat the Islamists?

On the face of it, its military preponderance makes victory seem inevitable. Even if Tehran acquires a nuclear weapon, Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the cold war. What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the gulag?

Yet, more than a few analysts, including myself, worry that it’s not so simple. Islamists (defined as persons who demand to live by the sacred law of Islam, the Sharia) might in fact do better than the earlier totalitarians. They could even win. That’s because, however strong the Western hardware, its software contains some potentially fatal bugs. Three of them — pacifism, self-hatred, complacency — deserve attention.

Pacifism: Among the educated, the conviction has widely taken hold that “there is no military solution” to current problems, a mantra applied in every Middle East problem — Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Kurds, terrorism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. But this pragmatic pacifism overlooks the fact that modern history abounds with military solutions. What were the defeats of the Axis, the United States in Vietnam, or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, if not military solutions?

Self-hatred: Significant elements in several Western countries — especially the United States, Great Britain, and Israel — believe their own governments to be repositories of evil, and see terrorism as just punishment for past sins. This “we have met the enemy and he is us” attitude replaces an effective response with appeasement, including a readiness to give up traditions and achievements. Osama bin Laden celebrates by name such leftists as Robert Fisk and William Blum. Self-hating Westerners have an out-sized importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the media, religious institutions, and the arts. They serve as the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahideen.

Complacency: The absence of an impressive Islamist military machine imbues many Westerners, especially on the left, with a feeling of disdain. Whereas conventional war — with its men in uniform, its ships, tanks, and planes, and its bloody battles for land and resources — is simple to comprehend, the asymmetric war with radical Islam is elusive. Box cutters and suicide belts make it difficult to perceive this enemy as a worthy opponent. With John Kerry, too many dismiss terrorism as a mere “nuisance.”

Jack Army tells the domestic defeatists that he’s not ready to go home. He’d rather fight militant Islam in the Middle East than on American soil.

I have read a number of blog posts, and news articles, editorals and the like, telling everyone who’ll listen…. er…. read, that we need to bring the troops home from Iraq. Big mistake, this Iraq war, and we need to stop throwing good money after bad, stop wasting the lives of our troops and blah blah blah.

Sorry, I am just frustrated about all this. I am just amazed that people want to just stop what we are doing and bring all our troops home after all we’ve done so far and all that is left to do. Seriously, it is amazing what is going on in this country and I’m so lucky to be a part of it. These people really want to live better lives and they are trying hard to do so. I feel like we owe it to them, to folks from other countries who are watching this, and to the troops who have already sacrificed for this, to continue to see this thing through.

What frustrates me most of all is the number of Americans that are rooting for us to lose. From media, to politicians and political pundits, to folks who just have no clue but put on airs of knowing all, there is a definite segment of the American population who genuinely wants us to lose this war. The whole “it’s a mistake” and “based on lies” memes are just ridiculous and aren’t based in reality, rather, they are based on misguided dreams of what life should be like. I hate to burst any bubbles here, but war is a part of life, and when bad people do bad things, war just might be the best way to stop them. War just might be the best way to free millions of people from oppressive dictatorship or repressive religious zealots. Especially when those folks have either declared war on us, or have aided and abetted those who are attacking us. I’ll not list all the terrorist attacks of the last quarter century, that list is posted plenty of places, but I will say that it is obvious that we’ve been drawn into a war with an enemy that is too happy to kill innocents, to flaunt the accepted laws of warfare, disregard the conventions and treaties protecting non-combatants and will just as soon kill a child as a Soldier.

And Americans want us to stop fighting that enemy? Why? So they can rest, recover, rearm, re-equip, retrain, re-infiltrate, and attack us at home… again?

There’s an argument being circulated, and has been for awhile now, that fighting in Iraq is creating more terrorists. It’s a load of crap. Sorry to be blunt, but that’s the truth. What creates terrorists is a societal acceptance of terrorism as a tool for political or social change… no, control. When we allow terrorism to change our laws, our lifestyles, our sense of security, we lose. We lose our freedom, our rights, our security and we give all the power over those things to terrorists who have no desire to be fair, kind or just. They just want power. They want things to go the way they want them to go and they don’t care who they hurt or kill in order to get their way.

I’d rather fight them here, in another country, away from my family and my fellow countrymen. More than that, I’d rather defeat them here, in a country trying hard to be free, trying hard to be secure, trying hard to be lead by good people rather than terrorists in politicians clothing.

Please tell your congressman than I’m not ready to go home.

Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.