Party Of Whatever

From Investors Business Daily:

Posted 11/2/2005

Iraq: Why did Democrats shut down the Senate on Tuesday? To make a point against the war. No, wait. They say they support the troops. Could it be that they're trying to have it both ways?

Even stunts can have a serious purpose, and we're sure Harry Reid & Co. had persuaded themselves that they were doing the people's work by suddenly shutting down the Senate's public deliberations.

Reid and the Democrats invoked a little-used rule to throw the Senate into closed session. Once behind closed doors, they badgered the Republicans about the supposedly slow progress of a probe into the Bush administration's handling of prewar Iraq intelligence. Republicans agreed to appoint a bipartisan panel to report on the progress of the investigation.

Reid claimed victory. "Finally, after months and months and months of begging, cajoling, writing letters, we're going to be able to have phase two of the investigation regarding how the intelligence was used to lead us into the intractable war in Iraq," he declared.

Never mind that, according to Intelligence Committee head Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the report was almost done anyway. The Dems had made their point. They aren't letting up on Iraq. And just you wait: They'll get to the bottom of things, debunk the case for war and expose George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as liars.
What then? The logical endpoint of such a strategy is withdrawal from Iraq. After all, if the war is shown to be a mistake, why keep fighting it?

That's the view of the Democratic Party's anti-war base. But the party can't win elections with votes only from its Cindy Sheehan wing. It needs to appeal to people in the political center, who may dislike the war but are uncomfortable with the idea of simply leaving Iraqis to the tender mercies of al-Qaida. These are voters who understand that "supporting the troops" goes beyond just giving them the right armor and weapons. It also means supporting what the troops are trying to do.

To these folks, the party tries to present a face of concern balanced with resolve, criticizing the administration while insisting on seeing the war through. That seems to be the position of the party's current presidential front-runner, Hillary Clinton, and it's certainly defensible. President Bush has made mistakes and is certainly not above criticism. It's perfectly consistent for supporters of the Iraq mission to note errors in Bush's execution of it.

It's something else, though, to attack the mission itself as fundamentally wrong, a mistake from the start. That's what the Senate Democrats were doing with their Tuesday tantrum. They not only want a report on prewar intelligence, they want a particular result: A finding that the Bush administration deliberately took America into a war on false pretenses.

They had hoped that the CIA leak investigation would turn up something like that, and it didn't. Now they're trying to get the intelligence committee to produce the smoking gun. So are they the antiwar party? Just watch what they do, not what they say.

At least the hard-left types are clear about their aims. Reid's stunt served no purpose other than to undermine public support for the war. If that's not his goal, he needs to explain what is.