House and Senate Vote for Defeat...Again

I'm at a loss to understand why the House and Senate would continue to work on a bill that has no chance of being signed by the president. Well, not totally at a loss since I do understand that this whole thing is just more political kabuki. I heard today that the timing is being designed to put the bill on Bush's desk on the 4th anniversary of the Abraham Lincoln "Mission Accomplished" speech. Now tell me, how does that help us defeat the enemy?

Of course, it doesn't, and while most Dems lined up to support Harry "War is Lost" Reid, one former Democrat had some words of warning for his caucus-mates:

When we say that U.S. troops shouldn’t be “policing a civil war,” that their operations should be restricted to this narrow list of missions, what does this actually mean?

To begin with, it means that our troops will not be allowed to protect the Iraqi people from the insurgents and militias who are trying to terrorize and kill them. Instead of restoring basic security, which General Petraeus has argued should be the central focus of any counterinsurgency campaign, it means our soldiers would instead be ordered, by force of this proposed law, not to stop the sectarian violence happening all around them—no matter how vicious or horrific it becomes.

In short, it means telling our troops to deliberately and consciously turn their backs on ethnic cleansing, to turn their backs on the slaughter of innocent civilians—men, women, and children singled out and killed on the basis of their religion alone. It means turning our backs on the policies that led us to intervene in the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the principles that today lead many of us to call for intervention in Darfur.

This makes no moral sense at all.

It also makes no strategic or military sense either.

Al Qaeda’s own leaders have repeatedly said that one of the ways they intend to achieve victory in Iraq is to provoke civil war. They are trying to kill as many people as possible today, precisely in the hope of igniting sectarian violence, because they know that this is their best way to collapse Iraq’s political center, overthrow Iraq’s elected government, radicalize its population, and create a failed state in the heart of the Middle East that they can use as a base.

That is why Al Qaeda blew up the Golden Mosque in Samarra last year. And that is why we are seeing mass casualty suicide bombings by Al Qaeda in Baghdad now.

Those are Joe Lieberman's words, and he is the one guy in the Senate with the power to fire Harry Reid and the Dems. Simply by switching from the Dem caucus to the GOP, the majority in the Senate would change (assuming Gordon Smith or Chuck Hagel didn't defect the other direction). It's time for Joe to go.