Dems Do Nothing

Freelance embedded reporter Michael Yon today, speaking with some authority that Democrats are still fighting the last war, and that the transformation marked by the surge is miraculous. Some further points on Democrat complaints now that the Iraqis have stepped up their own forces. WSJ:

Soldiers everywhere are paid, and good generals know it is dangerous to mess with a soldier's money. The shoeless heroes who froze at Valley Forge were paid, and when their pay did not come they threatened to leave – and some did. Soldiers have families and will not fight for a nation that allows their families to starve. But to say that the tribes who fight with us are "rented" is perhaps as vile a slander as to say that George Washington's men would have left him if the British offered a better deal.

Equally misguided were some senators' attempts to use Gen. Petraeus's statement, that there could be no purely military solution in Iraq, to dismiss our soldiers' achievements as "merely" military. In a successful counterinsurgency it is impossible to separate military and political success. The Sunni "awakening" was not primarily a military event any more than it was "bribery." It was a political event with enormous military benefits.

Do our Congressmen serve without pay? Would they like to dismiss the Capitol Police? Disband Homeland Security? Their behavior is already reprehensible on the home front. Do they think the rule of law occurs in a vacuum?

And the only time they ever want to cut a budget is for our defense, which to me is the top priority for the federal government.

At a time of war it's disgusting.

Recall how drastically Bill Clinton cut our military, even as he sent them on humanitarian missions all over the world, ran them ragged, and rained scuds down on empty buildings to wag the dog during the Monica days.

The Dems would undermine our troops as a political tactic because their other objections to the war have failed, given that Iraq has met a significant number of its benchmarks now and the war is being fought to win. Yon goes on:

This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting.

Depriving our troops of the supplies and numbers of reinforcements they need had tragic consequences during the Clinton administration--Blackhawk Down in Somalia, inspiring al Qaeda and Saddam and spawning the next wave of terror. And the Dems talk about Afghanistan but do nothing.

Featured Photo Golden Bird is by Michael Yon.