Yesterday, President Bush unveiled a "plan for victory" to shore up sagging public confidence in his Iraq policies. Though it broke little new ground, the president's speech at the U.S. Naval Academy did provoke an unfortunate reaction from House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who endorsed Rep. John Murtha's earlier call for a swift withdrawal of U.S. troops.
We share the widespread frustration with the Bush administration's utterly inept handling of Iraq's post-conflict rebuilding. But too much is at stake in Iraq for America to simply give up and come home. What Democrats really should demand from President Bush is victory, not a hasty departure.
Just two weeks ago, a bipartisan majority in the U.S. Senate staked out the vital center in the rancorous debate over Iraq. Rejecting both President Bush's "stay the course" appeals and demands for a deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops, the Senate instead called for clear benchmarks for creating the conditions that will eventually allow Americans to leave Iraq safely and with honor.
We believe that's still the wisest course. Almost everyone agrees that the United States will begin withdrawing some troops in 2006 as Iraqi forces become increasingly capable of fighting their own battles. By signaling that the occupation is winding down, a gradual drawdown may well abet political efforts to bring Sunnis into the new Iraqi government; we certainly hope so. But we can't take the risk that a rapid, politically driven withdrawal will miraculously cause the insurgency to collapse.
Demands for an immediate troop withdrawal or arbitrary deadlines risk turning premature declarations that the United States has failed in Iraq into a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is why Democrats must reject them.
If our forces leave before the Iraqis can defend themselves, the result will be a national security disaster for the United States. Iraq will be convulsed into full-scale civil war that could provoke a regional conflagration. The Sunni triangle will likely become home base for the global jihad network, a safe haven for hatching new terrorist plots against our country and our friends. America will once again have broken faith with Iraq's long-suffering Kurds and Shi'a, and the cause of Arab democracy will be set back for a generation.
Democrats should steer a course between two extremes. On one side are those in such a rush to end the war that they don't recognize the grave consequences of an immediate withdrawal. That is the wrong course for America, and the wrong course for our party.
At the same time, Democrats should reject President Bush's habitual tendency to frame the Iraq question as a test of nerve. It is also a test of skill -- a test the administration has badly flunked. The president's plan for victory has a "now he tells us" quality. Though the president was at pains to show that his administration is adapting to changing conditions on the ground in Iraq, he might have made a bigger impression by actually admitting the colossal blunders his administration has made in Iraq -- and announcing the firing of such key architects of failure as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Instead, the president, as he usually does, argued that American resolve is the sine qua non of success in Iraq. But resolve is not a strategy, as the plan released yesterday belatedly acknowledges.
The task for Democrats today is to hold the president accountable for results. We should press the White House to refine and meet its benchmarks, and put a new leadership team in place that inspires confidence. Above all, Democrats must make it clear to the public that we stand for winning in Iraq, not a rush for the exits.
