Why Is The ‘Cut And Run’ Strategy In Iraq So Important To Liberal Democrats?

Lee P. Butler

In two words the answer is, political expediency.

Besides calling our troops torturers, Nazis, cold-blooded killers who terrorize women and children at night, many liberal Democrats are already saying that they have failed their mission in Iraq.

Some liberals balk at that suggestion, saying that it’s a ‘failed policy’ not a failed mission. But the reality is, if the policy requires a certain outcome for completion, then the mission dictates that outcome be achieved. If the policy is a failure, then the mission is a failure and trying to paint the rhetoric in any other terms is just sophistry.

It’s the same as the ‘we support the troops, but not what they do’ argument. You can’t support firefighters, police officers, etc... if you don’t also support the actions of those people while they are doing their jobs by heroically put their lives on the line in the many dangerous situations they confront on a daily basis.

The same holds true for military personnel.

Don’t you find it strange that liberal Democrats never mention the devastating loss of life here in this country of our firefighters and police officers by constantly updating the hundreds, even thousands, of deaths that happen yearly, the way they so gleefully appear to do with the troops fighting the War on Terror?

The answer is simple, they can lay only our military loss of life at the feet of President Bush in the hopes of gaining political advantage.

Senator from California Dianne Feinstein said, “Three years and three months into the war, with all of the losses, the insurgency, the burgeoning civil war that’s taking place -- what was it, seven bombings in Baghdad yesterday? An open-ended time commitment is no longer sustainable.”

That statement is devoid of all rationale in the face of all the information we now have concerning what is taking place in Iraq as it relates to our military intervention and the Iraqi takeover of their own democratically elected government in lockstep with their own growing military ranks and the protection those troops are providing for themselves.

Which made it nearly impossible for liberal Democrats to stay quiet about Iraq because they thought they were making headway into defeating President Bush, who isn’t running for office, and Republicans in the upcoming November election.

Then news of a catastrophic event flooded their premature celebration of a November takeover amid their cries of failure everywhere.

The beheader, al Zarqawi was dead. Wounded in a precision air strike by our military, he later died of his wounds while in custody. Liberal Democrats were beside themselves as the reports besieged the 24 hour news cycle.

With that positive development, liberals had very little to say in the form of praise for our troops and their progress and some even bemoaned the possibility that Zarqawi hadn't died from his wounds, but from mistreatment by our military personnel.

And faster than you can say, ‘no indictment for Karl Rove’, the liberals were back to the old play book of calling the mission in Iraq a miserable failure. The 'cut and run' crowd were setting deadlines and crowing about another 'milestone' of total military deaths in the conflict.

A spokesman for failed presidential candidate John Kerry gave a clearly defined position for Kerry and his amendment to a recent defense bill when she said, "This is about saying we need to set a date and we need to withdraw," meaning pulling our troops from Iraq.

Only a handful of senators voted in favor of Kerry's position when the rubber actually met the asphalt.

But that didn't stop cut and run liberals like John Murtha from really showing how out of phase the Democrats are on the War on Terror when he praised the one event in American military history that emboldened Osama bin Laden to carry out the attacks on 9/11.

"Even in Somalia, President Clinton made the decision, we have to, we have to change direction," Murtha said as he tried to emphasize one of the Democrats new slogans, 'we need a new direction'.

Which means 'cut and run'. Liberals love to incorporate word games as a way to cover their true philosophical belief. They are now using the term 'redeployment' to cover their position of cut and run, in the same way they originally started using the term 'abortion' to hide from it's reality and their support of killing innocent unborn babies.

They have a visceral conviction that the average American is too uneducated and ignorant to realize what liberal’s intended goals are if they use 'big, fancy' words in place of just saying where they stand on an issue.

Again, here's Representative Murtha pushing for his 'redeployment' scheme, "So - and we don't have to be right there. We can go to Okinawa. We, we don't have - we can redeploy there [Iraq] almost instantly."

So Murtha tries to say that we can redeploy [move] our troops thousands of miles away and simply go back to Iraq "almost instantly", which begs the question, why would we leave if we'll have to go back? Shouldn't we 'stay the course' and finish the job so we don't have to go back?

Then, once caught in his illogic, he says we can use "fighter aircraft" and "cruise missiles" to deal with problems in Iraq "from the outside". We used an air strike to kill Zarqawi, but that was because we had troops in country who gathered intelligence that led to the successful strike. That's not possible being redeployed and operating in Okinawa.

Senators John Kerry and Russ Feingold sent out an e-mail to 3 million people asking for support to call for a withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, "by a hard and fast deadline." They wrote, "Our country desperately needs a new vision for strengthening our national security, and it starts by redeploying U.S. forces out of Iraq."

What else needs to be said? They want an 'abortion' from our mission in Iraq to help the Iraqis form and sustain a free and peaceful country whereby they can stand on their own and defend themselves.

That's not an 'open-ended' military policy. That's fairly definitive and the more aggressive our military actions in Iraq against the terrorists... the more trained Iraqi troops and stable elected government exist there... and the more support Iraq receives from other countries that have so far turned their backs on democracy and freedom in Iraq, the quicker and more effectively we can 'redeploy' our troops to other areas after winning the war.

Not cutting and running just when that moment of victory seems so close to being. Cutting and running is agreed by most military experts to be a disastrous decision at this critical moment in Iraq.

So why are so many liberals now adamant to utilize this predicted failure of a tactic? Because they think the more they repeat that they want to get out of Iraq now, it will win them more voters later.

They know we are going to win in Iraq, so if they keep up the mantra, eventually they will say that their 'pressure' to get out was the catalyst for that victory because they pushed the mission in a 'new direction' and their threats of 'redeployment' forced the Iraqis to take more control of their country faster than the 'open-ended policy' of the Bush administration.

Smoke and mirrors. Word games. It's all the liberal Democrats have left in their play book as everything they fight for is now done for political expediency as they strive to take back Congress.

They just don't realize that Americans are smarter than Democrats have ever believed them to be.