Cowardly Democrats Ducking Iraq Issue

As Chairman Carl Levin of Senate Armed Services
conceded Sunday,

Congress is not going to de-fund the war in Iraq,
even if Bush vetoes every Democratic timetable for
withdrawal.

The war will go on—backed by a Democratic Congress.

If Majority Leader Reid is not bluffing about his
threat to vote with Russ Feingold to cut off funds,
Harry will be rolled by a bipartisan coalition that
includes dozens of members of his own caucus.

For Democrats recall the consequences of having voted
to cut off funds for

the war in Vietnam, into which

JFK and

LBJ had plunged the United States. Whatever
Americans think about a war, they are not

a forgiving crowd when it comes to those perceived
as having

abandoned the troops or

ensured defeat.

That is what Democrats are toying with today. That is
why the GOP has begun to pound Speaker Pelosi, after her

runaway strut through the Middle East, to get her
vacationing colleagues back to Washington, and get that
$100 billion for the troops and the war passed.

No matter how Harry and Nancy bridle, the Congress
they lead will give Bush exactly what he demands. And
the final vote to fund the war, no strings attached,
will tear at the seams of a Democratic Party whose base
favors a rapid if not immediate withdrawal.

The Democratic Congress thus faces this April a
humiliating climb-down, and all because of a

Democratic Senate`s vote in October 2002—Tom
Daschle, Reid, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John
Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd all assenting—to give
George Bush his blank check for war.

If I had known then what I know now, I would never
have voted for the war, John Edwards assures us of the
most important vote that he,

Hillary, Biden and Dodd ever cast—the votes that
ensured America would commit the greatest strategic
blunder of their lifetimes.

This is not to absolve President Bush of culpability
for what historians will surely call "Bush`s War,"
or the

neoconservatives who howled for war on Iraq from the
moment the

planes hit the towers, and who had plotted and
propagandized for war on Iraq for years before 9-11.

Yet, Democratic courage in October 2002 might have
stopped the stampede, for Democrats were the last, best
hope of the opponents of war. But they failed the
nation. What the nation got was a vote to "get the
issue behind us," so Democrats could focus on
holding the Senate, which they lost in any event.

Now that we have passed the four-year mark in a war
that has lasted longer than the War Between the States
or World War II, what does the profit-and-loss statement
look like?

On the credit side, Iraq has been liberated from

Saddam Hussein and a Baath Party that tyrannized and
terrorized Iraqis for decades. Saddam is dead, his
henchmen have met justice, and none will hold power
again. Kurds are free. The Shia are liberated from
Saddamite and Sunni oppression.

The price of liberation, however, is scores of
thousands of Iraqi dead, many tortured and murdered by
their own kinsmen, a ravaged nation, a sectarian civil
war, al-Qaida in Anbar, 2 million exiles, the flight of
Iraqi Christians, the

probable break-up of the nation and the reversion of
Iraq to the status of a failed state.

For America, the consequences have been enormous,
when one considers that, measured by U.S. casualties,
this is not a major war.

We have lost 2,300 dead and 25,000 wounded, with

no end to the bleeding in sight. The worldwide
sympathy America enjoyed after 9-11 is history. America
is severed from old allies and despised around the
world. Our reputation suffers from Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo, Haditha.

The material

costs of the war run into the hundreds of billions,
and hundreds of billions more before it ends. The U.S.
Army is

"breaking" or

"almost broken," depending on whether one agrees
with the ex-Army chief of staff or Colin Powell.

America`s position in the Middle East is as imperiled
as ever it was in the Cold War, with the king of Saudi
Arabia accusing us of an

"illegal foreign occupation" of Iraq, and Arab
peoples professing pandemic detestation of America and
preferring Osama bin Laden as man and leader to George
W. Bush.

Most Americans are bitter at how the world perceives
us today, given the

sacrifices we made over 60 years to ensure that
freedom did not die and the world would be a better
place. But then gratitude has never been a long suit of
the human race.

Yet if the world does not love us, and the American
Empire is gone, are we not well rid of it? Perhaps Bush
should be thanked for having shown it is not worth the
cost and for having booted it away.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs


no introduction to VDARE.COM
readers; his book

State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America,

can be ordered from
Amazon.com.