These lines from the doughty Bush supporters at Power Line go to the heart of the matter:
The problem, in my view, continues to be the difficulty of defining "success." As the President warned, even if the new approach is "successful," our television screens will be filled with scenes of violence. But that is precisely what, until now, has been defined as failure.
From the other side of the aisle, Jacob Weisberg, writing in the FT, challenges the Democrats to deliver more than rhetoric:
Every president since Harry Truman has taken the position that it is unreasonable for permission to be required from Congress in advance of military action...
...But Congress’s power to terminate a war is even clearer than its power to forbid one in the first place...Perhaps the most striking example was the military intervention in Somalia. In 1993, the House of Representatives passed an amendment saying US forces could remain there only one more year. Two subsequent defence appropriations bills cut off funding for the deployment...
When they say they are incapable of stopping Mr Bush’s plan, what congressional Democrats really mean is that they are afraid to oppose it. With only 17 per cent of respondents supporting the "surge", according to a recent ABC-Washington Post poll, it is hard to see how voting against more troops would be an act of political suicide. But after years of being called weak, unsupportive of the troops and unpatriotic, flinching at conservative threats has become a Pavlovian Democratic response...
There are plausible arguments for supporting a surge and some good ones for rejecting a precipitous pullout. But Democrats who argue for withdrawal and fail to act on their convictions have no leg to stand on.
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