Doubling Down

First the House and Senate narrowly pass emergency funding bills for the War on Terror that lard on $20 billion in pork to buy votes. Then they fail to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate bills before jetting off to Spring Break even after affirming to the public this bill was a pressing concern. Nancy Pelosi and others went off to Syria to kowtow to Assad while the bill to keep the troops in food and bullets languished. Jack Murtha meanwhile has stolen a page from Charlie Rangel's playbook and is calling for a military draft. And Senator Barack Obama says those time lines in the funding bills are negotiable now if the President vetoes it.

Now we get to the real draw-dropper. Something that pundits on the left and right have been demanding of the Democrats to do, to show their seriousness. To show they have some stones. Something no one expected to actually happen. Senator Harry Reid [D-NV] has apparently been emboldened by the funding bill's passage and is feeling his oats. In something to make the ANSWER and Code Pink crowd [ remember the folks who harassed their own allies in the House - Obey and Pelosi for a pullout. ] swoon in happiness.

Senator Harry Reid, who snuck in $3.5 million in the Senate version of the emergency funding bill for insect control in Nevada, has declared he will cut off almost all funding to the troops by March 2008. His partner in this? Senator Russ Feingold who offers this observation of the event.

Congress has a responsibility to end a war that is opposed by the American people and is undermining our national security," Feingold said yesterday. "By ending funding for the president's failed Iraq policy, our bill requires the president to safely redeploy our troops from Iraq."

"Safely redeploy." A euphemism for retreat. An idea based in fantasy land. Such breathtaking idiocy. As if the terrorists will just quit attacking Americans and their Coalition allies as 20 brigades worth of equipment along with the 150,000 troops are redeployed. Many lambaste the ineffectual attempt after Saddam's fall to secure Baghdad from anarchy with reason. They ain't seen anarchy until all those Iraqis who decided to ally with the United States see the US starts to pull out. These Iraqis will bug out to save their lives and the lives of their families before the terrorists like the Mahdi Army start revenge killings that will probably rival the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Kurdistan up north will declare themselves independent from the rest of Iraq and Turkey will go nuts due to their restive Kurdish population. And of course if the anarchy really gets out of control, Iran and Syria can send in 'peacekeepers' to restore order while using Iraq's oil reserves to fund their own dreams.

That is the future Reid and Feingold are offering. A world far more dangerous and unstable than it is now. A world that is once again reminded of how fickle support from the United States is. Saigon and Mogadishu all over again.