Looking for Weakness?

From Investors Business Daily:

Posted 11/22/2005
Iraq: Calls for a U.S. pullout come from Iraqi leaders, Iran's supreme ayatollah and Democrats in Congress — each with differing motives. But the fact is we are winning, and now is no time for retreat.

Iraqi Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders under the auspices of the Arab League in Cairo called for a timetable for troop withdrawal in an agreement that itself signals democratic progress for Iraq. The timetable language was clearly designed to appease the Sunnis.

But key to understanding the communiqu is its explicit qualification that a U.S. disengagement be done "through putting in place an immediate national program to rebuild the armed forces . . . control the borders and the security situation." Training and strengthening Iraq's security forces is one of the things the U.S. has been doing there, and there are now more than 90 Iraqi army battalions fighting the insurgency alongside our forces.

Instituting a timetable would let the terrorists play a waiting game — and risk us leaving before Iraqi forces can combat the insurgency alone.

That is exactly why Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei just called on Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to pressure the U.S. to withdraw.

Yet calls to cut and run continue to come from Democrats in Washington, the latest from possible 2008 presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who wants 50,000 U.S. troops out next year.

Biden's approach is no more rational than Rep. John Murtha's, D-Pa., call last week for an immediate pullout: Both commit the U.S. to a leap-before-you-look policy that could mean us leaving before the job is done.

Democratic leaders, in fact, have a waiting game of their own going on. When asked by reporters last week what the Democrats' position was on Iraq, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., veteran of the Clinton White House and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, triangulated:

"At the right time, we will have a position."

Whenever that position materializes it will likely be more about winning congressional seats for Democrats in 2006 than winning the war in Iraq for America.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked those seeking withdrawal to "think about the troops that are there and how it sounds to them."

Indeed this is no time for the U.S. to lose its nerve. A Knight-Ridder profile of insurgents by correspondent Hannah Allam this week indicated that the combination of U.S. commitment and terrorist atrocities against Muslims can break the will of even the most fanatical jihadists.

"I'm still in shock" at this month's Amman hotel bombings killing 59 people, said Mohammed Hikmet, a Jordanian insurgent who fled home after a 13-hour standoff with U.S. troops in Baghdad.

"Blowing up Shiites in Iraq? Bombing a hotel in Jordan? This is not resistance," Hikmet said.

As Vice President Dick Cheney said this week, "retreat would convince the terrorists that free nations will change our policies, forsake our friends, abandon our interests whenever we are confronted with murder and blackmail."

Fulfilling our commitment in Iraq, on the other hand, will demonstrate something our enemies doubt: the moral courage of Americans in the face of evil.