Washington Retreat (Congress sends the wrong signal to the Iraqis.)

From OpinionJournal.com:

"We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American troops, but that wasn't our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war." -- North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, in a 1990 interview with historian Stanley Karnow.

It's been a bad week for the American war effort, not in Iraq or anywhere else in the field but in Washington, D.C. The American Congress is sending increasingly loud signals of irresolution in Iraq, including panicky calls for withdrawal.

There are many lessons of the Vietnam War, but two of the biggest are these: Don't fight wars you don't intend to win, and while American troops can't be defeated, American politicians can be. Like General Giap, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his fellow terrorists understand the second lesson very well, and so his strategy has always been not to capture Baghdad but to inflict casualties in a way that breaks the will of American elites. He'll only be encouraged by this week's show of Beltway duck and cover.

There's little comfort in the fact that Senate Republicans stood up Monday to Democratic demands for a specific troop-withdrawal timetable. The GOP Senate leadership still put itself on record that it believes time is running short. No wonder Minority Leader Harry Reid is bragging of having "change[d] the policy of the United States with regard to Iraq."

The resolution--which passed 79-19--sounds innocuous enough: It calls for 2006 to be "a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty, with Iraqi security forces taking the lead for the security of a free and sovereign Iraq, thereby creating the conditions for the phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq."