Bush, Democrats and Iraq

The House on Wednesday failed to override President Bush's veto of a $124.2 billion war-funding measure that included a firm time line for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

The House's 222-203 vote fell 62 votes short of the two-thirds majority required.

Seven Democrats broke with their party and voted to sustain the veto. Two Republicans, Walter Jones of North Carolina and Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland, voted with Democrats to override.

Minutes after the vote, congressional leaders met with Mr. Bush at the White House to begin talks on a new funding measure, which (obviously) would delete the firm withdrawal time line.

The war in Iraq costs the United States about $8.6 billion a month. Without a new bill, funds could start to run out in July.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said after the White House meeting that while "Democrats are committed to ending this war," lawmakers owe it to the American people to try to reach an agreement with Mr. Bush.

It was a "very positive meeting," Ms. Pelosi said.

What? If Democrats truly want to end the war, they need do only one thing: Go home. Do not meet with the president, do not work for a compromise that will keep American boys dying in Baghdad.

Go home. Take no action. Pass no spending bill whatsoever. By July, existing funds would start to run out. Yes, the White House might cannibalize money from elsewhere for a time. But within months, whatever funds remained would have to be used to fuel up the planes and ships to bring the boys home.

Democrats contend, "The ball is now in the president's court." If so, it's only because they've handed it back to him.

Now, mind you, the fact that the Democrats are racing to get some money into the pipeline so the troops don't run out of ammo is a good thing. Their reasons are more cynical political calculus than patriotism -- they know that declaring the war lost, pulling out and leaving the Iraqis to suffer a massive bloodbath does not play well in the polls.

Remember, challenger Ned Lamont might have won his primary among left-wing Connecticut Democratic zealots last summer, but his "surrender with honor" platform promptly went down to undignified defeat at the hands of pro-war (Democrat-turned-Independent) Sen. Joseph Lieberman in the autumn general elections.

So the strategy of Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Vichy, has been to go through the motions of "trying to cut off funding for the war" so they can tell the Neville Chamberlain branch of their own constituency, "We gave it our best shot" -- all the while with no intention on God's green earth of ever really seeing it happen.

This is good, because (as President Bush has rightly pointed out) announcing to the enemy the date fixed on which you intend to surrender is not exactly a recipe for victory, or even for bolstering your own troops' morale while undermining the other guys.

What's ludicrous is that the Democrats in Washington still insist they're "trying to end the war" -- by which they mean they will now agree to a set of nonbinding, face-saving, endlessly re-interpretable "security benchmarks" that supposedly have to be met if the president wants to keep his forces in Babylon.

And just to show they're really focused on the war? The new spending bill, like the one just vetoed, will likely contain some $20 billion in pork for people still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, along with a provision outlawing the jobs of all Americans currently earning between $5.15 and $7.25 per hour, paired with $4.84 billion in tax cuts for small businesses.

It would all be somewhat amusing if we weren't talking about a political party that, a year from now, will be asking Americans to trust it with the White House, and with it the formulation of clear, firm, decisive foreign policies that could equally well cost or spare thousands of American lives, along with the lives of hundreds of thousands of freedom-loving people all around the globe, not only on the battlefield, but wherever the unvanquished terrorist next opts to strike.