Reid was Right

Attack. Attack. Attack. Is that really all the Bush team knows how to do? Yes, it has won them two elections but it doesn’t help a great deal when it comes to governing.

Take the latest effort at going nuclear over Harry Reid, a usual target. OK, I grant you that “the war is lost” makes a nice sound bite to eviscerate. No one likes to hear that anything is lost — your wallet, your umbrella, your pet — let alone a war. The trouble is that Harry Reid became so furious at George Bush and his my-way or the highway approach to this war that he let it fly. The surge is not working, he said — hard to argue with that after the last several weeks.

But Bush and his attack dogs have it all wrong. This is precisely about supporting the troops……as the bumper sticker says: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, BRING THEM HOME. Reid and other Democrats have given the president everything he has asked for and then some, as Budowsky writes. It really is time to set limits, to avoid making the same mistakes as we did in Vietnam, when over half those 58,000 who died were killed after the war was “lost.”

Bush can only attack Reid to try and boost his own sad policy, not try and come up with a political solution that works, and works fast.

We create more insurgents each day than we kill. We now have polls in Iraq that show over 80% of Iraqis want us out. We are losing more precious young men and women, both Americans and Iraqis, every day. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a lost cause, weakening our military beyond what is imaginable, and destroying the country in order to save it.

Democrats in Congress are proposing benchmarks for the Iraqis to meet, setting exit strategies, calling for dialogue, as did the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group. The Bush doctrine is more of the same. My guess is that Secretary Gates may return from his trip to Iraq and report privately to the president what members of Congress have found (Republicans and Democrats) — the country is falling apart and our presence is hurting not helping. That would be the honest assessment and, how ironic, not far from what Reid declared in his own impolitic way.