Congressional appeasement backfiring....

"In Middle Eastern warfare, a classic tactic has been to retreat in the face of strength, but to attack when your enemy withdraws or shows signs of weakness."

Retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters in the New York Post

Ah yes... the obvious is yet again over looked by the poll-conscious "new Congress in town". Even promises of delivering Iraq to the hands of fate by a defined date doesn't appease radical, political Islam. Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe gets it and, without mincing words, says so in his column, "The smell of irresolution".

Begs one to question their "phased withdrawal or redeployment" idiocy. You leave troops there with few buddies to watch their back, they will be slaughtered. But does a Congress care? No. They are absolutely clueless to the consequences of their demands. They are not military strategists. They are lawyers and poll suck ups who know nothing about the nuances of war.

HERE'S A puzzle: Why would Al Qaeda choose the past several days, just as Democrats in Congress were voting to run up a white flag and commit the United States to defeat in Iraq, to launch a bloody wave of terrorist atrocities?

For weeks, there had been noticeably less bloodshed and chaos in Iraq's most dangerous areas. The number of civilians murdered in Baghdad, for example, had dropped from 1,222 in December to 954 in January to 494 in February. US military deaths had dropped 20 percent during the first month of General David Petraeus's new counterinsurgency strategy , while the number of suspected terrorists captured had soared tenfold.

Nevertheless, the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate chose to move ahead with legislation requiring the United States to withdraw its troops from Iraq. Of course a US withdrawal is precisely what Al Qaeda wants -- Osama bin Laden has crowed that "the failure of the United States . . . in Iraq will mean defeat in all their wars." Wouldn't it have made more sense, then, for the terrorists to continue lying low, doing nothing that might queer the American retreat?

What could Al Qaeda have hoped to gain by shattering this relative lull with last week's horrific attacks? The carnage included a suicide bombing in a Baghdad market that killed at least 60 people, mostly women and children, and a triple car-bomb massacre in Diyala province that left 28 civilians dead. But why now? With Washington's top Democrats embracing the surrender agenda -- Senate majority leader declared on Tuesday that "this war is not worth the spilling of another drop of American blood" -- why would the terrorists unleash a renewed wave of slaughter and mayhem?

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