The Dems' Dark Side

From IBD:
Posted 5/18/2006

Politics: Among the truly astonishing aspects of the Democrats' foreign policy is how much of it comes out of the Vietnam playbook. It's a dark vision, one that anticipates defeat in Iraq.

This vision clouds their effort to cobble together their own version of the Republicans' creative "Contract with America," which led to the GOP storming Capitol Hill in 1994. That famous victory ended four decades of legislative domination by the Democrats.

Just maybe, Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi figure, this time their party needed only 12 years to retake the fortress. The Senate and House minority leaders propose a "contract" with voters — college and health care for everyone, a climate-controlled world, deficit reduction, and so on — that, while glib, conceals motives far less honorable.

The war on terrorists, if not exactly taking a back seat, seems not to be quite the priority the Bush administration has made it. Sure, party talkers will show up on cable to emphasize their superior handling of terrorism. After all, didn't they force the massively bureaucratic Department of Homeland Security on us?

When they're not demagoguing some innocuous feature of the war such as the Dubai ports deal, many Democrats actually rub their hands at the prospect of impeaching President Bush. Something about the way the commander in chief conducts this war — far more respectful of civil liberties than Franklin Roosevelt's mobilization against Germany and Japan — offends these Democrats deeply. Hothouse hearings, anyone?

Rep. John Conyers, who stands to take over the House Judiciary Committee, offers assurances he's in no rush to impeach the president, though almost certainly he'll find it difficult to resist party activists motivated by that prospect. These activists imagine they're about to net the second Richard Nixon.

With polls showing dissatisfaction with the U.S. effort in Iraq, more Democrats now think they've been granted permission to call for a staged withdrawal. As she grilled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Wednesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein advocated exactly such a dangerous strategy — a position generally reserved for Sen. John Kerry, who has his own Vietnam angst to nurse.

On the same day — just as Iraqis were successfully forming a civilian cabinet — Rep. John Murtha claimed U.S. troops in November had massacred Iraqi women and children "in cold blood." Such an incident had been reported in March by Time magazine, and it is under investigation, but Murtha could cite no sources other than "commanders" with whom he'd talked.

Murtha, clearly hoping he'd found another My Lai massacre, blamed "pressure" for the alleged incident. That way he could hold Rumsfeld accountable for authorizing insufficient troop levels, thereby politicizing the Iraq war. The antics of the Pennsylvania congressman, who is endlessly depicted by the mainstream media as an erstwhile hawk, were irresponsible in the extreme.

Pelosi doesn't think so. On Thursday the minority leader charged the Pentagon with covering up the incident. Such an incendiary comment suggests that she, too, thinks she's found another My Lai with which to turn public opinion against the war.

To underscore the Democrats' inability to break out of Vietnam, there emerges Tom Hayden — who privately negotiated with Hanoi three and a half decades ago to strengthen America's antiwar movement — exhorting Democrats to embrace a withdrawal.

"The peace movement," writes Hayden in The Nation, "should also be planning now to make it virtually impossible for presidential candidates to campaign successfully in 2008 without committing to a speedy withdrawal from Iraq."

Hayden cynically calls on the Left to unite behind a withdrawal plan devised by some conservative critics of the war. Wherever he finds allies, he would signal America's enemies to wait out the withdrawal, just as he signaled North Vietnam in his heyday.

The totality of the Democrats' response to terrorism since 2001 leads to such dark conclusions. The party's behavior in matters of grave importance to national security comes across, frankly, as unserious or worse. Getting Osama bin Laden, as they promise, would make us all happy. It would not by itself win the war on terrorists.

When the party's 2000 frontrunner, Al Gore, says bluntly that global warming threatens Americans more than any jihadist with a suitcase nuke, you do wonder about his party's sense of proportion. When the Democratic leadership ignores every stride toward a workable constitution in Iraq, indeed trumpets every setback, you have to ask:

Do they want defeat?