No more words, and no more promises

(image by the wonderful darkblack)

And then, contra Andrew, we have this douchebag:

If I were George Bush right about now, I’d wrap my arms around Harry Reid and give him a great big kiss on the cheek. And I might even consider sending Speaker Pelosi a dozen roses, thanking her for playing her part to perfection in this Democratic Party defeatist extravaganza. For in truth, the Democrats are handing the President the one thing he desperately needed in order to maintain the surge, veto the Iraq supplemental with its timetables and withdrawal stipulations, and unite the Republicans as they haven’t been since the election last November; a political club with which to beat his opponents and re-energize support for the war among his base.

It’s been a while since Bush was presented with such a gift. In previous months, the Democrats played the Iraq card with great care and skill, not getting too much out in front of the American people while maintaining support for their position by framing the debate as one of “altering course” rather than cut and run. They successfully portrayed the President as intransigent on changing strategy. And, of course, the Democrats were helped enormously by the constant drumbeat of negativity regarding the surge as a result of several high profile, horrific bombings with large civilian death tolls.

As an aside, in one of the great historical ironies of all time, the very same elements in the media and on the left that took the Pentagon to task 40 years ago for harping on enemy body counts to show progress in the Viet Nam War now confidently use body counts to show that the surge supposedly isn’t working.

C’est la vie! C’est la guerre!

. . .In truth, the Democrats and the left have already left the surge for dead. No matter what news comes out of Iraq, the Democrats will spin it to prove that the strategy is not working. Unfortunately, this will be relatively easy to do since the insurgents and terrorists are very obliging in working hand in hand with the defeatists in Congress to undermine the President’s strategy by getting as big a bang for their buck with each brutal attack on innocent civilians as they can.

Yeah, right. The President's strategy. Of ensuring defeat even before the whole thing started:

Before the invasion of Iraq, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and Army Secretary Thomas White advised Rumsfeld that many more troops would be needed to secure Iraq (something on the order of 250,000 to 300,000). Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose State Department was shut out of the post-war planning process, also privately argued for a bigger force. A RAND Corporation analysis, published in summer 2003, offered a range of estimates for what size force would be necessary in Iraq. Using troops-to-population ratios from previous occupations, RAND projected that, two years after the invasion, it would take anywhere from 258,000 troops (the Bosnia model), to 321,000 (post-World War II Germany), to 526,000 (Kosovo) to secure the peace.

Bastards.