Compromise on Iraq funding bill

Despite some familiar whining from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. — who vows she may still vote against part of the package when it comes before the House — congressional Democrats faced with a second presidential veto on Tuesday gave up their demand for troop withdrawal deadlines as part of a $120 billion Iraqi war spending package.

The move is being widely portrayed as a political “victory” for President Bush, and concomitantly a “defeat” for Democrats.

In fact, while the Democrats can indeed be criticized for a certain amount of posturing — apparently designed to assuage their anti-war constituency, to whom they can now make a hollow claim to have “tried” — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the loyal opposition are to be congratulated for doing the right thing.

Assuming a model Western-style republican form of government could be imposed on that land of ancient strife and divisive enmity may indeed have been naive.

But there’s no denying the gleeful mass killers hard at work keeping Iraq unstable today — not Iraqis, for the most part, but Islamic terrorists filtering into the country from other gulf states bearing false documents from Syria — are the sworn enemies not only of America, but also of a peaceful Iraq and of peace between the Islamic lands and the rest of the world, in general.

Such characters cannot be defeated — or even sent home with their tails between their legs — by giving them a fixed date by which American forces vow to surrender and retreat. Such a step would enormously damage the morale of our own fighters, since at that point we would be asking them to take risks and make sacrifices to no purpose, at all.

And that’s no way to fight a war.

Democrats made their political point. Their only other option was to cut off funding for the troops, entirely.

They retain the right to do that, if they want. But “cut and run” doesn’t seem to have fared too well in their polling and focus groups.

In the end, Democrats said they did not have enough votes to override another presidential veto, and that they were unwilling to strand American forces without fuel and ammo.

Good.

No one is pleased with the recent progress of the Iraq occupation. New strategies to de-fang the terrorists are welcome. But surrendering — inviting al-Jazeera to televise jubilant Islamists firing their guns into the air, throwing candy, waving the severed heads of Iraqis who have worked for peace and order as they dance on the wreckage of some downed American helicopter — would be neither popular, nor far-sighted, nor right.

Let’s be thankful even Sen. Reid and the Democrats can see that.