The White House, stung by the most recent vote in the Senate calling for a pullout of U.S troops from Iraq, made clear its strategy for opposing passage of any bill with a deadline for troops in Iraq. Consider what said on THIS WEEK ON ABC by White House counselor Dan Bartlett: 

STEPHANOPOULOS: Will the president sit down and negotiate with the Democrats now?
 
BARTLETT: The president, as well as his staff are more than willing to sit down and talk to congressional leaders but what we haven’t seen from the Democratic leadership is a willingness to drop this very restrictive language that’s basically substituting the judgment of politicians here in Washington with the judgment of our commanders on the ground. …120 days, so right in the middle of this important Baghdad security plan going on in Baghdad as we speak, 120 days from now, right when we’re going to have all of our troops on the ground, they say, it’s time to throw in the flag and start bringing them out.

In other words, don’t undercut the troops when they are in the midst of fighting. It is an oldie – I remember them saying the same thing in Vietnam – but a goodie nonetheless. And what do the Democrats say in response?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me turn to the issue of the war funding resolution. As Mr. Bartlett pointed out, barely passed the house, 218 votes. You had a two-vote margin on the key amendment in the Senate as well, so you’re really hanging by a thread. And I wonder are the Democrats going to be able to come up with a compromise on the conference report?
 
SEN. DICK DURBIN [D-IL]: In bipartisan votes in both the House and the Senate, we’ve come to the same conclusion. It’s time for American troops to start coming back home in an orderly basis. We believe that this war should come to an end. The American people agree with us. When Mr. Bartlett talks about a coherent military strategy from the Bush administration, how does he explain the fact that we’re in the fifth year of a war, that we have over 150,000 of our best and bravest men and women in uniform caught in the crossfire of a civil war with no end in sight, that the Iraqis refuse to make the political concessions they need to make to bring their own country together? We are saying, we’re expressing what the American people are saying.

Meanwhile, over on Meet The Press, Representative Charlie Rangel (D-NY) spoke quite honestly about why the Democrats are pussyfooting around on bringing troops back home:   

RUSSERT: If you want to stop the war, why not just simply cut all the funding off?
 
RANGEL: Because you don’t have the votes to do it. There are some people who believe that if you cut all the funding off, you leave our soldiers and military people exposed; that they’d have no money, and then would go back to the scene we had a Vietnam where we were fleeing by helicopter.
 
And so it’s all compromise. That’s what legislation is all about, and you have to make the best moral and conscious decision.

And insofar as America continues to be disengaged from its military forces in actuality, if not rhetorically, this excerpt is worth pondering: 

RUSSERT: In your book, “And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since,” we’ll come back and talk about where that title came from, but you write this, “The indifference of the architects of our foreign policy to the sacrifice of our youth outrages me so. The president and his men have neither the personal experience for identification nor a relationship with the communities that send young men to war. I ask people who support the war if they would continue to back it if their kids were eligible for a draft. They all say no.” You want a draft?
 
RANGEL: I want people to recognize that when a nation goes to war, there should be shared sacrifice. Instead, we give trillions of dollars to the richest and make an appeal to those people, who have no future in business. We recruit in the areas of the highest unemployment — that is morally wrong.

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