It's apparently true that you can lose every battle and still win the war. After using every possible bit of leverage available to them in Congress, Democrats were thwarted, demeaned, and derided as traitors by Republicans for demanding a for troop withdrawl from Iraq. Then, after they had maligned Democrats for their temerity, Republcans promptly took the plan as their own.
WASHINGTON -- Senate Democrats reacted critically and skeptically to a report yesterday that the American commander in Iraq had privately presented a plan for significant troop reductions in the same week they came under attack by the GOP for trying to set a timetable for withdrawal.
Bottom line: The President caved in to Democratic demands to get us out of Iraq.
Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, said the plan attributed to General George Casey resembled the thinking of many Democrats who voted for a nonbinding resolution to begin a troop drawdown this December. That resolution was defeated on a largely party-line vote in the Senate on Thursday.
``That means the only people who have fought us and fought us against the timetable, the only ones still saying there shouldn't be a timetable really are the Republicans in the United States Senate and in the Congress," Boxer said on ``Face the Nation" on CBS.
Senator Carl Levin, one of the two sponsors of the nonbinding resolution -- which offered no pace or completion date for a withdrawal -- said the report was another sign of what he termed one of the ``worst-kept secrets in town," that the administration intends to pull troops out before the midterm elections in November.
``It shouldn't be a political decision, but it is going to be with this administration," Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said on ``Fox News Sunday."
As one blogger put it:
... Karl Rove has convinced the President that, like on tax cuts, if the President wavers in iota from his rhetoric and stance on Iraq, it will collapse his credibility and his presidency. As bad as Bush's poll ratings are now, they would nosedive into the low 20's if Bush looked like he was caving in to political considerations on the Iraq war.
They were against it before they were for it, because they had to be. The real cowardice in this sickening period of American history belongs to the cynicism and weakness of the Republican party as they struggle like schoolyard bullies to show themselves arrogantly tough, even as they weakly prove that they stand for nothing.
And of course, now that the President supports the Democrat's plan, it's worth noting that the Iraqi government has already endorsed it.