Three weeks after winning Congress, the Democrats turn their backs on Americans

The folly of America’s administration and its apologists, among them the New York Times, the Washington Post, and now the “opposition” party, the Democrats, knows few bounds.

Consider Robert Fisk’s Like Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in denial:

More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia – and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself – as he apparently did in Amman yesterday – that the United States will stay in Iraq “until the job is complete”?

[…]

About the only truthful statement uttered in Amman yesterday was Bush’s remark that “there’s a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq [but] this business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all.” Indeed, it has not. There can be no graceful exit from Iraq, only a terrifying, bloody collapse of military power.

Now consider, on the other hand, the Times’ Idea of Rapid Withdrawal From Iraq Seems to Fade:

In the cacophony of competing plans about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: despite the Democrats’ victory this month in an election viewed as a referendum on the war, the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff are signaling that too rapid an American pullout would open the way to all-out civil war. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has shied away from recommending explicit timelines in favor of a vaguely timed pullback. The report that the panel will deliver to President Bush next week would, at a minimum, leave a force of 70,000 or more troops in the country for a long time to come, to train the Iraqis and to insure against collapse of a desperately weak central government.

[…]

Standing next to Mr. Maliki on Thursday in Amman, Jordan, Mr. Bush declared that Iraqis need not fear that he is looking for “some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq.” But a graceful exit – or even an awkward one – appears to be just what the Iraq Study Group, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, tried to design in the compromise reached by Republicans and Democrats on the panel on Wednesday.

Ah, the Democrats, erstwhile friends of the anti-war movement. They stood with the majority of Americans against the war just a few weeks ago, now, they support the Bush plan for Iraq with merely a few vague adjustments.

A democracy requires opposing points of view. A democracy requires an active press that speaks truth to power. A democracy requires active public debate, not “consensus” handed down from on high.

No country should quibble and mutter and praise its own good intentions while the country it occupies burns. No opposition party should stand by and watch this happen, let alone participate in it.

Shame on you, Democrats, for turning your back on Americans, Iraqis and the rest of the world so soon after promising so much.

[tags]Democrats, Iraq[/tags]