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Defense, National Security, and War in Iraq

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GOOD FOR McCAIN

February 19, 2007

National Review
Kathryn Jean Lopez
When Majority Leader Harry Reid announced late Thursday that there would be a Saturday Senate session to yet again debate a cowardly nonbinding Iraq resolution, Arizona senator John McCain didn't change his weekend campaign plans.

Good for Senator McCain.

The Democrats -- and at least one GOP opponent's camp -- sent the news that McCain would spend Saturday in Iowa not Washington around as if they had McCain in a Gotcha! moment. "McCain's been the biggest cheerleader for the president on the war -- the least he can do is actually show up for the vote," a DNC spokesman crowed to the Politico's Jonathan Martin.

Saturday's proceedings however, are a disgrace. John McCain, who was for the surge long before the White House was, has made his position on the surge clear. Though vote skipping is not something to encourage in a United States senator, you don't have to be a campaign donor to be glad that he went to Iowa as planned this Saturday.

As Bill Kristol wrote at week's close, the majority party in Congress has staked their position as those who will "fecklessly try to weaken the U.S. position in Iraq, and America's standing in the world, by raising doubts as to our commitment in Iraq without advancing an alternative."

John McCain wanted nothing to do with the Saturday stunt. So, instead of catching the first flight back to D.C., McCain blasted the demoralizing antic as "an insult to the public and our soldiers to think a cloture vote to cut off debate on a motion to proceed to another cloture vote to cut off debate about a meaningless resolution is anything other than a partisan stunt and an evasion of our responsibilities."

As the former Naval aviator and Vietnam prisoner of war said earlier this month when the Senate first took up this nonbinding nonsense: "Where is the intellectual honesty if you think that you're sending young Americans into harm's way in a futile effort? I know if I felt that way, I would say, 'My resolution is a binding resolution that cuts off funding.' That's the intellectually honest approach."

The resolution the House passed Friday didn't get a vote in the Senate on Saturday afternoon just before the body adjourned for a break -- Democrats fell short on the 60 votes needed to end the debate, even with seven Republicans joining the majority party's lead.

Democrats would have you believe that the cloture loss was the Republicans indicating that they do not want Congress to debate the war. In truth it was a procedural vote to not continue on to a final vote on a damaging nothingburger of a resolution. On Friday afternoon, newly Independent senator Joseph Lieberman explained his plan to vote against cloture well: "I will do so not because I wish to stifle debate -- the fact is that debate has occurred, is occurring now, and will continue to occur, on our policy in Iraq. I will vote against cloture because I feel so strongly against the resolution. It condemns the new plan for success in Iraq, I support that plan."

Those 34 present on Saturday voting against cloture also voted against playing along with what, if comments Jack Murtha made last week and Nancy Pelosi appears to support are any indication, looks to be a slow-bleed play from Senate Democrats to shortchange our troops. First rhetorically, then financially.

As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell put it on Saturday from the Senate floor : "Let those of us who support the president's plan to win in Iraq say so. Let those of us who oppose it say so. But we will not be forced to vote for a resolution that says we support the troops but does not ask us to seal that pledge with a promise to help them carry out that mission in the only way they can -- funding their mission." If voting against the war is what you want to do, then do it, openly and honestly, but don't don't try to have it both ways, as Nancy Pelosi did on Friday, pouring empty praise on American servicemen and women over in Iraq as she lead a vote to disapprove of what they are doing over there. Pelosi and Reid may be the technical leaders of the U.S. Congress, but that's not leadership.

Again, Joe Lieberman -- the Democratic party's 2000 presidential candidate -- said it well on Friday:

The non-binding resolution before us is not about stopping a hypothetical plan. It is about disapproving a plan that is being carried out now by our fellow Americans in uniform, in the field. In that sense, as I have said, it is unprecedented in Congressional history, in American history. This resolution is about shouting into the wind. It is about ignoring realities of what's happening on the ground in Baghdad.

It proposes nothing. It contains no plan for victory or retreat. It proposes nothing. It is a strategy of "no," while our soldiers are saying, "yes, sir" to their commanding officers as they go forward into battle.

And that is why I will vote against the resolution by voting against cloture.

I understand the frustration, anger, and exhaustion that so many Americans, so many members of Congress, feel about Iraq, the desire to throw up one's hands and simply say, "Enough." And I am painfully aware of the enormous toll of this war in human life -- and of the mistakes that have been made in the war's conduct.

But let us now not make another mistake. In the midst of a fluid and uncertain situation in Iraq, we should not be so bound up in our own arguments and disagreements, so committed to the positions we have staked out, that the political battle over here takes precedence over the real battle over there. Whatever the passions of the moment, the point of reference for our decision-making should be military movements on the battlefields of Iraq, not political maneuverings in the halls of Congress. It's not an obviously wining strategy -- being consistently supportive of this escalation in U.S. involvement in Iraq. In fact, if the surge doesn't help stabilize Iraq, it will be a thankless position. But it's the right thing, especially now that the plan is not but a theoretical plan but a work in progress. And John McCain deserves credit for his leadership on the issue -- whether from Iowa this weekend or Capitol Hill.






February 2007 Articles