Redstate

By Charles Bird Posted in War — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Iraq is Ted Kennedy's Vietnam, warmed over for 2005. Stuck in the decade long quagmire of minority status in the US Senate, Kennedy's "solutions" will offer more years of backbenching for Democrats. His ideas for Iraq today are the same as they were for Vietnam thirty two years ago: Cut and run. In June 1973, he voted to cut off all funding to the South Vietnamese government, practically ensuring a communist takeover by the North Vietnamese, the ramifications of which were the killing fields of Cambodia and a bruised and shaken USA. Kennedy's answer then is not too different from his answer today, which is to abandon our mission in Iraq and send our troops home, denying our soldiers the chance to see those objectives to fruition.

Building on his speech on January 12th, which urged Democrats to be more liberal, not to mention the Mayflower Gasbag Disaster of 2004, Senator Kennedy is continuing the Jurassic politics of a bygone era. In 2003, Kennedy earned a 95% rating from Americans for Democratic Action, with 100% being a perfect liberal score. Yesterday, he was at it again:

In the name of a misguided cause, we continued the war too long. We failed to comprehend the events around us. We did not understand that our very presence was creating new enemies and defeating the very goals we set out to achieve. We cannot allow that history to repeat itself in Iraq.

So fighting communism was a "misguided cause"? Bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq is a "misguided cause"? How misguided! Four days before their first real national election in history, Senator Kennedy now believes the rhetoric of Muqtada al Sadr and Sunni "insurgents", that Iraq "has become a war against the American occupation". While Kennedy may believe the presence of American soldiers in Iraq is unproductive, more unproductive is Kennedy's rhetoric. Why? Because he offers no substantive alternatives, just vague boilerplate:

We need a new plan that sets fair and realistic goals for self-government in Iraq, and works with the Iraqi government on a specific timetable for the honorable homecoming of our forces.

What specifically is Ted's Excellent Plan? He doesn't say. Establishing artificial and politically negotiated timetables is the mother of all bad ideas. Troop levels should always be based on the timing of our completed objectives. America has the resources to prevail. Our success has more to do with political will than anything else, and the Baathists and terrorists know it. By calling Iraq a "catastrophic failure", Ted Kennedy is playing right into the hands of the enemies of freedom and democracy, and at the same time and spitting in the faces of those Iraqis who have committed themselves to the interim government and reconstruction. When Kennedy says that "America’s goal should be to complete our military withdrawal as early as possible in 2006", he is falsely declaring American defeat and, in effect, ceding victory to al Qaeda, Sunni theocrats and militant Baathists. If he applied the same amount of will to winning Iraq as he does to his liberalism, Iraq would be secure right now. The Wall Street Journal made some apt observations:

As the new Senate leader, Mr. Reid is going to have to decide whose side he's on. From his days as minority whip, he knows that the Daschle strategy of fighting everything cost Democrats two seats in 2002 and four more last year. More broadly, Democrats have now lost three national elections in a row, the last two in part because of perceptions that they were weak on national security. Maybe it's time to try something else.

Democrats could even try to work with the White House to solve some problems, and get some credit for doing so. Certainly that strategy might help some individual Senators running for re-election to keep their seats. The Kennedy Democrats are betting that Iraq will become such a quagmire that they can safely run against the war and prosper in 2006 on a voter backlash. But even if they're right about Iraq, it's just as possible that voters won't want to reward Democrats who sound like they're cheerleading for America to fail.

Tom Daschle lost his majority and then his own career taking Ted Kennedy's advice. Democrats who want their party to succeed had better hope Harry Reid doesn't make the same mistake.

Democrats will take this advice with a grain of salt, considering the source. Edward Kennedy turned his back on the South Vietnamese people thirty two years ago, and they paid dearly. By prioritizing troop withdrawals over victory in this struggle, the Iraqi people are seeing the same view of Kennedy's backside and it's not pretty.