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The Democrats' quagmire

Kenneth R. Timmerman
November 23, 2007

Democrats in Washington just can't seem to help it. Even when great opportunities arise that would allow them to look like patriots, they sponsor yet another bill to cut off funds for our troops in Iraq.

Last week, Democrats in the House of Representatives voted yet again to fix a firm deadline to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. It was their 40th such vote. Luckily, their motion died in the Senate, where the Party of Surrender failed to muster enough votes to survive a presidential veto.

Also last week, House Democrats passed a measure, inappropriately titled the RESTORE Act of 2007, that would stick consumers with billions of dollars in legal fees and enrich trial lawyers, as part of an across-the-board assault on the administration's effort to wage the war on terror.

The RESTORE Act eliminates a key provision from a bill to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs how the U.S. government can intercept suspected terrorist communications, to allow private lawsuits against telecommunications providers who answered the government's call to turn over phone records of suspected terrorists.

As former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton noted in a recent Baltimore Sun opinion column, eliminating immunity for the telecom providers “would deter companies and private citizens from helping in future emergencies when there is uncertainty and legal risk.”

I just returned from Iraq, and one thing leaped out at me, as it has to just about anyone who has been there recently: This is not the same war we were fighting just one year ago. Then, the president faced a U.S. Marine Corps intelligence report that Anbar Province had been “irrevocably lost” to al Qaeda and that we would never win it back.

Today, Sunni Arab sheikhs in Anbar have rallied to the United States and to the cause of freedom, and have launched an all-out war against al Qaeda. The terrorists — not the U.S. Marines — are on the run.

In the Kurdish-controlled region, also known as “the other Iraq,” a boom economy is threatening the Democrats with what they fear the most: a frank and overwhelming U.S. victory in Iraq.

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