Informed Speculation

The editor of the New Republic writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The House has passed a nonbinding resolution supporting our troops already in Iraq and disapproving the dispatch of 20,000 more. The measure is, strategically speaking, pointless: The new troops are already on their way. The Senate will figure out how to make its own sense of the politically fraught perplexity. Now, both houses of Congress are perfectly entitled to debate anything of this magnitude. Indeed, they have a responsibility to do so. A war should not shut down free opinion, or–worse yet–informed opinion. So the attempt of the House minority leader, John Boehner, to scare them away from a serious debate with demagogic references to the American Revolution is unseemly. This is a weighty war, very weighty. The absence of a serious debate about its ends and its means would rightly earn the national legislature the contempt of all Americans.

But the formula that the House Democratic leadership fixed on was a charade. It allowed each of the 435 representatives five minutes at the podium, enough for them to posture for local television but not so much that anybody can say anything serious, let alone deep or even brave. And the resolution’s text itself is rather cowardly. For, since it purports to be a declaration of support for American soldiers actually fighting in Iraq–whatever “support” actually means–why does it criticize the only help that can possibly enable the military in the war: more soldiers and more weapons? And, if the Democrats do not want the war to be continued, then they should bring forth legislation either cutting funds or setting a date for withdrawal, in the manner of George McGovern. There is no rationale for troops in terrible danger to be held hostage to the political expediency of nervous Democrats, who are not prepared to do what they really mean to do and to say what they really mean to say.

Only one resolution was debated on the House floor, and no amendments were permitted. Not quite a debate, is it? One sees in Nancy Pelosi’s iron-fisted eagerness to get everyone into line a measure of her years in the wilderness. She will have her way. And the political hothouse is even more torrid in the Senate. There, after all, sit the candidates for president. One would think that, given the threat to her nomination posed by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton would be more flexible in her views on the war. Her insistence on not saying that she had made a “mistake” in voting for the 2003 deployment of troops to Iraq puts her out of the center of gravity of her party. Mr. Obama has set the tone and the pace for the Democrats, and he has the advantage of having been clearly antiwar from the beginning. I suspect that almost all Democratic aspirants will end up imitating him. Why won’t Mrs. Clinton capitulate to Democratic orthodoxy that the war was always a “mistake”? Out of pride, of course: Hillary Clinton doesn’t make mistakes. Only other people do, and especially George Bush.

Senate Democrats are also making sure that no real debate will be held in that body. But, in a certain material sense, the Senate has already approved the administration’s enhanced strategy in the war by confirming Gen. David Petraeus’s appointment as the U.S. commander in Iraq. Whose strategy do the Democrats imagine our soldiers will be following? If they didn’t want this strategy and they didn’t want to continue the war, they should have turned him down. That would have been a real message, and a true one.

But the Democrats want it both ways.

Debate Iraq? By all means – we debate it every day, here, there, and everywhere, and certainly in the press conferences on Capitol Hill.  But there is no requirement for Republicans to stand aside and let the Democrats force the terms of the debate meekly and without objection.  A true debate is open to both parties, and not an occasion for one party to engage in grandstanding.  That’s not a debate, it’s a monologue…