DEMOCRATS: YOU WERE ELECTED TO END THIS WAR

By Richard Reeves

Fri Mar 9, 6:04 PM ET

WASHINGTON -- There were folks who joked or argued before last year's congressional election that winning would be the worst thing that could happen to Democrats. Joking or not, they seem to have been right.

The Democrats have to bite the bullet on Iraq, American bullets. They can hold all the hearings and propose multiple all-things-to-all-Democrats resolutions they want -- like the one House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record) "unveiled" on Thursday -- but if they keep that up, they will own a half-share of Bush's war by the 2008 elections.

Democrats were elected to end the war, not to debate it. The American people, enough of them, are past debate. The war was a mistake. The government lied. The war is lost. It does not matter when we leave; the same horrific things will happen in Iraq no matter when we leave. The only difference to us now is how many more Americans (and Iraqis) will be killed or maimed or ruined -- for no good reason.

Quoting an editorial on cutting off funding for the war, written more than 500 miles from this hermetic capital, in the Buffalo (N.Y.) News:

"The argument made by Bush partisans that limiting the war equates to a lack of support for our troops is similar to the argument made by the drunken brother-in-law that cutting off his liquor supply means you don't love him. The difference being, of course, that while the nation's leaders are the ones with the denial problem, it is the soldiers and their families who suffer ..."

Americans know all this already. Even the press, which failed miserably before the war and during most of it, has finally figured out how to get the real story out: Think small! Both television and newspapers around the country are covering the small, tragic stories of individual American (and Iraqi) families being destroyed in the name of ... what? Those "little" stories, which include the reporting on the scandals of military medical care, are having more impact now than anything said in Congress or at the White House.

But in Washington, they still think they can talk their way out of the chaos we have wrought. This paragraph is from The New York Times last Thursday, covering still another hearing: "'You have to protect the (Iraqi) people long enough to get economic assistance to them and change their attitude and change their behavior,' said Jack Keane, the retired vice chief of staff of the Army, who has argued that the troop buildup should last 12 to 18 months. 'You cannot do that in weeks. It takes months to do that. The problem with the short-term surge is that the enemy can wait you out.'"

Wait us out? Of course they will wait us out. They live there. We don't. They have been there for thousands of years. They will be there for thousands more. We are leaving; it is only a matter of when.

After all their hearings and conferences, the Democrats, at least in the House, came out with their plan to leave in the fall of 2008. The plan includes giving the president "waivers," which means there is no deadline and there is no plan. The best analysis of what the Democrats are doing now came from a Republican, House Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (news, bio, voting record): "The Democrats are making it complicated to pacify the third of their caucus who want to immediately cut off funds to the troops, the third of their caucus who would like to cut off funds for the troops but don't want credit for it, and the third of their caucus that ran as Republicans and are running away from the other two-thirds of their colleagues."

That's exactly right, and those complications could destroy the victors of 2006 when they go back to the voters in 2008. One Democrat, an unelected one, Terry Michael, former press secretary of the Democratic National Committee, gave his party some uncomplicated advice in a sort of open letter to Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, published in The Washington Times: "You rise on the Senate floor. You say you were out of your mind to write a blank check for this hideous abuse of American military power. And then you propose an immediate withdrawal, just slow enough to maximize the safety of the 135,000 young men and women you helped put in harm's way by your collusion with this elective war."