When John Murtha announced his plan for a 6-month withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq on Thursday, many expected renewed clashes between those in favor of and those opposed to continuing the occupation. Though scores of Democratic leaders have been advocating an end to the war, none have Murtha’s war hero resume nor his 30-year pro-military voting record, so by today’s warped standards they lack the credibility needed to raise a serious debate. So when Murtha took to the podium in a non-descript House conference room to deliver his speech Thursday morning, both sides of the aisle braced for impact.

As Murtha’s words were filtering through the House and across the airwaves, Republicans took a wait-and-see approach until it became clear that Murtha’s stature trumped his relatively low profile with most reporters. The evening headlines uniformly read “Democratic hawk urges Iraq pullout,” a sentiment Republicans could ill-afford to let stand. So with the clock ticking to the Thanksgiving recess, the Republican leadership drafted a single-line resolution (Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.) they named after Murtha though it bore no resemblance to his plan. But deceptive naming was just the beginning of the the lengths House Republicans went to in an attempt to slime Murtha and paint Democrats into a corner.

Late Friday afternoon, when members are usually back in their districts for the weekend, the House was in session playing out the game Murtha set in motion the previous morning. Republicans had to break the rules just to get their resolution to the floor as legislation can’t be proposed and voted on in the same day, but of course rules in this Congress are for suckers. The debate on the rules changes and various amendments was coarse and heated, most notably when Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt of Ohio (winner of a recent special election over Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett) continued her habit of respecting only the soldiers who happen to agree with her when she used a speech on the floor to repeat what she said was a message from a Marine constituent of hers:

“He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do.”

The ensuing melee was hard to follow as the C-Span microphones were cut, but according to the Washington Post:

Dozens of Democrats erupted at once, pointing angrily at Schmidt and shouting repeatedly, “Take her words down” — the House term for retracting a statement.

Eventually Schmidt meekly denied that she was directing her words at Murtha, (which would have also been against house rules) and withdrew her statement, though after once again exposing herself and many of her colleagues for what they really are.

The debate went on for several hours with a few party-line procedural votes before the GOP resolution that was supposed to divide Democrats failed to pass by a vote of 403-3. Now, not much is currently expected from this Congress. Several members of the majority are under investigation for corruption in Ohio and Texas, some for their ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, much of their agenda has been stalled due to its own stench, and their party’s leader is politically toxic after a steady slide in the polls. So far this year, they conducted a three-ring circus to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, repeatedly disregarded their own rules, and failed to even hold a vote on Social Security privatization, the President’s top legislative priority.

The floor debate on Friday sank below the bar already lowered by the above transgressions. It’s one thing for blog commentors to be unclear on the difference between opposing a war and being a traitor; between advocating a new strategy and giving aid and comfort to the enemy; between winning the war and whatever it’s called that we’re doing now. It’s something entirely different when sitting members of Congress who must swear an oath to the Constitution are equally unclear. In fact, it’s appalling. An example:

But Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tex.), who spent seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said U.S. forces in Iraq “need our full support.” He added: “They need to have full faith that a few naysayers in Washington won’t cut and run and leave them high and dry.”

Now frankly, Johnson’s statement disgusts me, but I don’t need to assail his character in order to refute his words. Not one member of the Democratic delegation in Congress is suggesting that our soldiers deserve or will get anything less than our full support. Likewise, they are not proposing, nor would they support, leaving them high and dry. But by injecting language like that into debate about the war, he is questioning those facts, and taken to their logical end, Johnson’s words in effect accuse Democrats of not caring about the welfare of our troops and envision a scenario in which Democrats would vote to de-fund the military leaving no resources to even return those serving in Iraq back to their stateside bases. This patently false and irresponsible rhetoric should have no place in the House, but sadly DeLay & Co. have all but institutionalized it.

In the end, the Republican ploy to divide Democrats was as ham-handed as their boutique bill for Terri Schiavo’s parents, and the timing of the floor debate might have consolidated their untenable position.

1115.org 9/23/05:

I’m convinced that the Bush administration is looking to use a draw-down of forces in Iraq to influence next year’s election. How will any Democratic national security strategy play in the face of yellow-ribbon parades in every red district across the country?

CNN 11/18/05:

[Gen. George Casey] has submitted a plan to the Pentagon for withdrawing troops in Iraq, according to a senior defense official…It includes numerous options and recommends that brigades — usually made up of about 2,000 soldiers each — begin pulling out of Iraq early next year.

But speaking to U.S. troops at a base in South Korea, the President repeated the same words he has been using for more than a year now:

…our military is helping to train Iraqi security forces so they can defend their people, and so they can fight the enemy. And we’re making steady progress. With every passing month, more and more Iraqi forces are standing up, and the Iraqi military is gaining new capabilities and new confidence.

Given the reality, it appears that the President is effectively saying that the length of the war will approach infinity:

[in late September] Casey…told Congress that only one Iraqi army battalion was ready to go into combat without U.S. support, down from three estimated a few months ago.

Implementation of Casey’s drawdown plan becomes more likely when considering the negative progress of the Iraqi army, the endless string of bombings and other attacks on our own soldiers, the ethnic tensions that could explode after next month’s election, and of course the looming specter of the 2006 mid-term elections where polling shows a gaping Republican disadvantage. Obviously Casey’s plan and the President’s words are at odds, so it’s worth noting the discrepancy. During Friday’s debate, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) referred to our current Iraq war policy as “insane.” He rightly pointed out that insanity means doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. By continuing to parrot the same lines about the Iraqi army taking over and all the progress that’s being made in contradiction to the assessments of both journalists and his own commanders, the President is directly refusing to relinquish an insane policy. Our soldiers continue to die pursuing the potential stability that a capable Iraqi army may provide while the President uses the specious argument that “…the best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission and lay the foundation of peace by spreading freedom.” But again, with Iraqi military readiness headed in the wrong direction, so do peace and freedom. What does Iraqi peace and freedom even look like? The President has yet to say, and his flawed logic calls for sacrifice without end for American soldiers in Iraq. Casey’s plan obviously uses the December election as the withdrawal trigger. So what’s it going to be?

“Cut-and-run” is the formulation that war supporters assign to those advocating withdrawal, mostly because it carries a cowardly connotation. Is it more cowardly to advocate extracting our troops from a mission designed to fail or to demand they remain out of political concerns? Is it more cowardly to ask for the President’s plan and metrics of success or for him to repeat the same empty mantra for two years? What is the plan? What is the strategy to achieve that plan? What tactics will be used in that strategy? Simple questions that have repeatedly gone unanswered for far too long now.