Resolved

NRO ^ | 3/21/2003 | David Frum

[Utah Girl]

Six months ago, Congress authorized a war against Saddam Hussein. Today the legislators will continue debating a resolution to support that war. Strange, no?

Democrats are complaining about the “partisanship” of Republicans who force them to declare themselves. They want to keep their options open – like Tom Daschle, who votes for the war and then denounces it, who says he supports the troop but who opposes the job that those troops are doing.

Nor is Daschle the only Democrat playing a double game. Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ leader in the House, also claims to “support the troops.” But in a speech two weeks ago at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, she mused regretfully that the Iraq war could have been prevented “if the people had gone onto the streets five months ago in these numbers in our country and around the world ....”

It’s time to lay down some standards here. Many Democrats opposed the war with Iraq. That’s their prerogative of course – and if the war ends badly it will equally be their prerogative to say “We told you so.” But while the war is on – while American forces are engaged in combat – it is their duty to say nothing that might tend to embolden or sustain the enemy.

I happened to catch Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm on the Charlie Rose show last night. Pollack is no supporter of President Bush’s. He is a very reluctant Iraq hawk, a veteran of the Clinton National Security Council who spent much of the 1990s opposing military action to overthrow Saddam. I don’t know whether he is literally a Democrat or not, but his general outlook on the world appears to resemble that of Tom Daschle much more than that of George W. Bush.

Yet here is what he had to say, based on my hasty notes. Saddam knows that his regular army cannot stop the United States. His plan is to retreat into Baghdad behind his best troops, to create what he hopes willl be – in Pollack’s phrase “a Mesopotamian Stalingrad.” Not that Saddam imagines that he can win this battle – but he does hope that if he can extend it long enough, the antiwar movements in the West will somehow force Bush to halt the campaign. In other words: the protesters are Saddam’s best hope.

Democratic pols should think hard about that before playing footsie with them.

[Uncle George]

Dashole and Peloski should have an extra mouth on the back of their neck, so they could speak out of both sides of their heads. Waffleing, fence sitting, two faced socialist trash.