This is politics at it’s worse. While the GOP has accused Democrats of playing politics with the lives of soldiers, it is evident they are the ones who were playing the games:
White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.
Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15, when the top field commander and the new American ambassador to Baghdad are scheduled to report on the effectiveness of the troop increase that the president announced in January. But suddenly, some of Mr. Bush’s aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the war’s future and financing.
Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
A month ago, the Republicans were accusing the Democrats of wanting to “cut and run” and “micro-managing the war”. They kept saying that our side wasn’t giving Petraeus’ plan “time to work” and invoked all these great analogies of how it takes a lot of time. It has been one month.
So what has changed?
Let’s start answering that by looking at what has remained the same. Iraqis are still being killed at high rates. Soldiers are still perishing at high rates. The Iraqi government still isn’t standing up to their obligations. Basically the this has been the status quo since April (check my Iraq surge reports for proof of that).
Now for the changes. Well – we are a little closer to the 2008 elections. Besides that, nothing else has changed.
We had a chance to stop this war a couple of months ago and these GOP senators choose not to. Since then over 200 soldiers have died, along with countless Iraqis. I welcome their newly found opposition to the war, and sincerely hope that they stand up to their new convictions. That still doesn’t change the fact that these same senators were also the enablers. They might think they are pulling the wool over the eyes of their voters, but they aren’t.
The Democrats tried to stop this war, while the Republicans prevented that. These Senators have shown a truly bad side of politics. The death of the 200+ soldiers that perished since the last attempt to shut this war down now lies squarely on the “defectors”. Help shut this war down, and you might be able to sleep better at night. The price you pay for your ignorant loyalty to Bush will be your political future. That is a very small price to pay, compared to that of our soldiers and their families.