There Came A Time When the War Was Lost

It seems now, in advance of the President's speech tomorrow where he's going to announce heroically returning troop levels to where they were before the surge began and before our armies collapse in on themselves through overuse and exhaustion, that the fight is going to move to just how many troops are coming home. I'm too disheartened to look around for links to the no doubt feeble Democratic plans to bring home slightly more troops or to force the Bush the Younger into actually reversing a decision.

At this point, it's increasingly apparent that this battle's lost before it's even been waged. Any kind of real withdrawal is going to take upwards of a year, at best. There's only 18 months left in the current administration. So Bush's delaying tactics have succeeded in running out the clock. The time to dig in the heels and truly fight was with the appropriations bill. But the Democratic Congress caved then. They're craven now. And the thing is, the chance that there might be another conservative administration to follow this disastrous one in digging us deeper into the grave is too big a risk to bear. There's no way that I'm not voting Democratic in 2008. There's no way I can even stay home. So there's no way that Democrats pay a price for shuffling their feet while the sands flowed with blood.