Pre-emptive Surrender
Sphere: Related ContentHenryk Broder, one of Germany’s few contrarian journalists, recently wrote a book decrying the weakness of the free West in the face of Islamic fanaticism. Tongue firmly in cheek, he called it: Hurra, Wir Kapitulieren, (Hurray! We’re Capitulating). Broder was primarily addressing Europe’s political class. But if the machinations of the Democratic Congress last week are any indication, the tendency toward gleeful submission before enemy forces cannot be dismissed as an exclusively Continental phenomenon.
Exhibit A in this tendency was the passage on Friday of the “non-binding” House resolution condemning President Bush’s strategy of boosting troop levels in Baghdad. If Democrats had the courage of their antiwar convictions, they would have taken a page from their predecessors in 1973 and exercised the power of the purse to deny any further funding for the war effort. But this would require principle, however misguided, and Democrats are primarily interested in political posturing.
The result? Even as American troops were marching into battle, House Democrats, abetted by 17 Republican defectors, were prejudging their mission a failure. How to reconcile last week’s vote with the fact that just weeks ago the Democrat-led Senate unanimously approved Army Gen. David Petraeus to command that same mission is anyone’s guess. Time may yet prove the House skeptics right about the wisdom of the surge. But it won’t alter the fact that at a dire time for the country they have acquitted themselves abominably.
And they were just getting started. As a sequel to last week’s resolution, House Democrats are working on what the Politico.com website described as a “slow-bleed strategy.” Cynicism on a spectacular scale, it works like this: Into a forthcoming bill on supplemental spending for the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Democratic leadership intends to insert prohibitive restrictions that will make it all but impossible to deploy additional troops into the military theater.
Read the rest at FrontPageMag.com
![[Valid RSS]](http://politicalpartypoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")