Fighting Yesterday's Argument to Deal with Today's Present is to be Stuck on Stupid

While doing some research for my follow up post on the "little known history of slavery", I came across this great quote in another Thomas Sowell article (it should be read, regarding the "factional" novel and movie, "Roots"):

what Winston Churchill said during World War II: "If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost." Some disastrous policies had been followed in the years leading up to World War II, and Churchill had sharply criticized those policies at the time but, now that the war was on, looking back could only interfere with the life-and-death job at hand.

I thought that passage aptly applies to today in regards to how the Democrats offer no solutions and only finger-pointing and blame-handing, on the issue of Iraq. As George Will says in the beginning of his piece in today's Washington Post,

Indiscriminate criticism of President George W. Bush is an infectious disease. Some conservatives seem to have caught it, but congressional Democrats might be crippled by it.

And Victor Davis Hanson opens his latest with,

Why did a majority of Democratic Senators - such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Harry Reid, Jay Rockefeller and Chuck Schumer - vote to authorize a war with Iraq on Oct. 11, 2002? And why is this war now supposedly George Bush's misfortune and not theirs?

I find it only helpful to al Qaeda and America's enemies to observe this kind of rabid infighting amongst America's Congressional leadership. And how is it that these Democrats want to micromanage the war and yet be absolved of all responsibility for it? Is it that President Bush is "the decider" only when things aren't going well? So then, I suppose it's only right that Democrats not take credit for any of the successes; after all, many of those successes have occurred in spite of them, and not on account of.

Hillary's Bush-blame makes little sense when she refuses to admit she shares in having "made a mistake". If she is able to excuse her vote to authorize war based upon what she knew then, how is it in the same breath she is able to not excuse the President who made his decisions, based upon what he knew at the time as well? I find that it also reflects badly upon her, when she says if she knew now what she didn't know then, she would never have voted for the authorization. I believe that the irresponsible course of action based upon what we knew at the time, would have been to maintain the status quo. And based upon what we, the public, do know now, I think removal of Saddam was and is, a good thing.

President #42 was right in making "regime change" for Iraq a national policy; President #43 was right in having the courage to turn rhetoric into action.

Iraq is still a story without an ending. The Democrats want to quit. They have already resigned themselves to failure, although by any rational estimation in comparison to sacrifice and loss sustained in previous wars, Iraq is far from being a military disaster. Potentially, it will become a political foreign policy disaster should the U.S. abandon Iraq; a disaster not because we went in there in the first place, but because we did not have the moral courage and intestinal fortitude to stay there and finish what was started. As VDH concludes,

So instead of self-serving attacks on the present administration, Democratic senators and candidates should simply confess that while most of the earlier reasons to remove Saddam remain valid, the largely unforeseen costs of stabilizing Iraq in their view have proved too high, and now outweigh the dangers of leaving.