I have in my possession an internal document from the Senate in which Senator John Kerry blasts the Congress for its gutless debates over non-binding resolutions against the mission of our troops in Iraq.
Following are some passages I find particularly interesting:
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of telling Iraqis they are now in control of their own country….
Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Iraq someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say they we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Bush won’t be one to, and these are his words, “cut and run.”
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President’s last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says and says clearly:
But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is terrorism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the terrorists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight terrorism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now….
We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America which as the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war.
We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Iraq now….
We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership?
OK, I confess, this stuff is actually pulled out of Kerry’s old Winter Soldier testimony, with President Bush subbed in for President Nixon, and Iraq filling in for Vietnam. The ideas expressed remain unchanged, though, and should be equally applicable. If the Congress believes the war is a mistake, why are they telling the troops in the field now, that they are the last men to die for that mistake?
There is no redeeming value, no defense of any kind, for the non-binding resolutions the Congress has debated. Either the war is right, and the resolutions are undermining our effort, or the war is wrong, and the resolutions are cowardly for refusing to rescue the troops from it. Shame on the Democrats, and shame on the Republicans who join them in this.
I have been demoralized since the election, but this political point-taking on the backs of our troops must not stand.