June 18, 2007

Democrats’ Iraq ‘Victory’: The Take-Down of Peter Pace

Well, the Democrats finally accomplished something on their Iraq agenda. Perhaps they will have cake.

They’ve failed to cut off funding to the troops. They’ve failed to force a date for the U.S. to surrender. Those were crucial goals. It’s hard to lose a war when you can’t make important things go wrong.

So imagine their pride last week when they landed a big fish by taking down the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace. Defeating an enemy is always easier if you can throw the enemy’s command structure into chaos and instability. And it must be doubly satisfying for the Democrats to know that they deprived U.S. troops of the services of their commander with the help of the hapless Secretary of Defense.

I miss Donald Rumsfeld. This would never have happened under his watch.

But when the time came to re-nominate Pace for a new term as Joint Chiefs chairman, kinder-and-gentler Pentagon chief Robert Gates was told that he could expect a confirmation battle, with Sen. Carl Levin and other Democrats taking the opportunity to skewer everything about the war effort. It would be grand TV. It would be embarrassing to the Bush administration, which would of course be the point.

So Gates, who claims he had otherwise intended to re-nominate Pace, instead informed him that he would prefer to capitulate to the Democrats, avoid the skirmish and nominate Navy Adm. Michael Mullen. Gates asked Pace to voluntarily step down. Pace refused, saying it would be a dereliction of duty to the highest degree to walk away from his command post in the middle of a war. He would be letting his troops down. He wouldn’t do it.

So Gates decided to be the one to let the troops down. It was what Sen. Levin wanted, and you can’t risk upsetting Sen. Levin by actually trying to win the war. He will get steaming mad and denounce you on TV. Those glasses might finally slip the final eighth of an inch and fall off his nose. It would be that serious.

Michael Mullen may make a perfectly fine chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That is beside the point. Changing commanders at a crucial point in a war, just to avoid a political maelstrom, is insane. Those who capitulated to the political threats are pathetic. Those who made the threats – and would have surely carried them out – are beneath contempt.

For his part, Pace informed Gates that he was ready to mix it up with Levin and anyone else who wanted to take him on. He was ready to defend the war effort and reasons for undertaking it. He probably would have done an excellent job. But Gates apparently sees his job as avoiding all conflict with Democrats, which is a pursuit of cowardice he cannot possibly achieve, as conflict with the administration is the Democrats’ reason for being.

Democratic leaders must feel a lot better now. Earlier in the week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi found themselves resorting to a UN-style “strongly worded letter” informing President Bush that the troop surge has failed, even though everyone said it would take until September to know if it had succeeded. It must be frustrating when you want failure so badly and it’s so slow in coming. Of course, this is not the first time Reid has declared the war lost, but they say you have to make your point in five different ways before people start understanding it. The troops are still fighting to win. Reid needs to try harder.

Is there any reason to continue to be polite about this? Carl Levin, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are doing everything they can to cause America to lose this war. They are scarcely even pretending anymore. The only thing saving the mission from their attempts to undermine it is their own political cowardice, which prevents them from cutting off funding, but isn’t enough to stop them from taking down the top officer in the Armed Forces just to score political points.

Bush has largely been steadfast, but his decision to dump Rumsfeld and replace him with a weak, ineffectual political appeaser like Gates is at best an error in judgment. Perhaps he thought giving the Democrats Rumsfeld’s head on a platter would satisfy them. That worked about as well as it usually does. Once they had that, they came after Pace’s head too – and Gates delivered it up, perhaps in the hope that it would prevent him from being next.

This is a hell of a way to fight a war. One party wants us to lose. The other party is trying to calculate how many human sacrifices will be necessary to placate the domestic enemy so it can focus on fighting the foreign one.

In the meantime, the mission of our troops, the fate of a nation and the prospects for democratic reform in the Middle East hang in the balance. But who the hell cares about that?