The 1990s were a silly time. But that decade did produce, at its close, an impressive pair of vice presidential candidates--Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman. Both spoke up last Thursday as the congressional debate over Iraq reached a new low.
Vice President Cheney was asked on Fox News about concerns that the Iraq war was hurting Republicans. "We didn't get elected to be popular," Cheney said. "We didn't get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican party."
This was a just rebuke to the 11 Republican congressmen who had visited the White House the day before. They had two purposes in mind: to tell President Bush that the Iraq war was harming the GOP, and then to tell the media that they had visited the White House to convey that message. The media are primed to reward Republicans for defecting from the White House on the war. So the Washington Post reported on its front page Thursday that the House Republicans had spoken truth to power. They told it to the president like it is. The on-the-record star of the meeting was Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia. "People are always saying President Bush is in a bubble," Davis told the Post. "Well, this was our chance, and we took it."
But what chance did they take? How did they help the president deal with a crucial foreign policy challenge? Davis "presented Bush dismal polling figures to dramatize just how perilous the [Republican] party's position is, participants said." Polling figures!
These
same Republican congressmen presumed--at the very same meeting--to criticize Iraqi politicians. Yet the Iraqi political class is showing a lot more courage than the American political class. They risk assassination. Our politicians risk electoral defeat. Yet it is our politicians who panic--and do so shamelessly and abjectly. And stupidly. Do the Republicans who want Bush to cut and run really think they would benefit if Iraq were to blow up, with U.S. troops helplessly standing by watching the slaughter, the full spectacle of American defeat unfolding before the American people? Here is a fine posture for a Republican to assume in 2008: I voted for the war, and then I voted for the surrender. Who in their right mind would vote for such a person?
As for the Democrats, they are in a way less abject. Most of them simply believe the war is lost, or that it should be lost, and want to throw in the towel. The day after panicked Republicans descended on the White House, almost three-fourths of the House Democrats voted to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq within 90 days. The rest of the Democratic caucus--with a handful of exceptions--embraced a slower-bleed defeat, presumably seeking a bit more political cover.
Only one Democrat--now an "independent Democrat"--called them on their vote: Joe Lieberman. As the members of his party voted for defeat, he took to the Senate floor to plead for full funding of our troops: "Only a couple of months ago, the Senate confirmed a new commander to implement a new strategy in Iraq, General David Petraeus. That new strategy is now being implemented, and it is achieving some encouraging, if early, signs of success. . . . Yet, now many in Congress would pull the plug on this new strategy and thwart the work of our troops before they are given a fair chance to succeed. I am aware that public opinion has turned against the war in Iraq. . . . But leadership requires sometimes that we defy public opinion if that is what is necessary to do what is right for our country. . . . Al Qaeda itself has declared Iraq to be the central front of their larger war against our way of life. . . . Our judgment can be guided by the polls and we can withdraw in defeat. [But] no matter what we say, our enemy will know that America's will has been broken by the barbarity of their bloodlust--the very barbarity we declare we are fighting, but from which we would actually be running."
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