False Choice
The New Hampshire Union Leader has an editorial pointing out the obvious absurdity of Nancy Pelosi's posturing on the Sunday morning talk show circuit. They call the attempt to nuance support versus surge a false choice.
Sending an additional 30,000 or so troops to Baghdad might or might not be a sensible policy. (For more discussion, see the opposite page.) We will have to see exactly how many troops President Bush wants to send and how he intends to use them. At this point the details are sketchy. But to suggest that sending more forces is in no way related to supporting the ones already there is to talk complete nonsense.
If U.S. forces in Baghdad are vulnerable because there are too few of them, if they lack the manpower to complete their mission, then sending more troops is not, as Pelosi suggests, creating a new and separate mission. It is, by definition, supporting the troops who are there by giving them the help they need to do their jobs.
In August of 1942 the United States had only half a million troops stationed overseas, according to the Army's official history of the war. The next year the Army sent nearly 1.5 million men to fight abroad. If the politicians of then thought like Pelosi does today, they would have approved of rearming the 500,000 troops fighting the Germans, Italians and Japanese, but not sending the additional forces necessary to win the war. Refusing to increase troop strength where needed is the very definition of abandoning troops who are already in the fight.
At this point, Pelosi's rhetoric does not amount to abandoning the troops currently fighting terrorists in Iraq. But it has created a convenient way for Democrats to abandon Iraq and our mission there if they perceive that doing so is politically expedient for them
I have a much greater personal stake in this than do the vast majority of bloggers. That does not give me absolute moral authority, but it may give me a bit different perspective. When the Democrats begin threatening to cut off funding, I take it very personally. My son is one of the people who will be directly impacted by a funding cutoff. And despite Pelosi's rhetoric, you cannot separate one set of funds from another in this instance. Cutting funding to the troops will have a negative impact on the troops currently in Iraq.
The election did not give the Democrats a mandate to cause the US to lose a war. They need to keep that in mind or they will suffer for it in 2008. They need to put the good of the country ahead of this partisan political agenda. Playing politics with troops on the ground is unacceptable.
By Jack, Tuesday, 9 January , 2007 @ 3:19 pm
Funny, but I ran across an article dealing with this just today. I posted it to my site.
Nancy Pelosi Promises to Defund WOT in favor of WOTC
http://themissal.blogspot.com/2007/01/nancy-pelosi-promises-to-defund-wot-in.html