I have a hard time believing the Democrats don’t want the U.S. to win in Iraq. What they don’t want is for any plan THEY might offer to fail. Since they don’t have a plan of their own to win, their plan is to wait for Bush to fail and then demand the troops be pulled out and thus be considered the great saviors and that in essence is “their win”.

They have to be careful how they do this though..timing is everything. That is why they took the step of the no confidence vote which meant nothing. It buys them a few months time before they feel they must take steps to answer their constituients by cutting funding, etc. In the event the Bush plan starts to succeed, they’ll back off and somehow take credit for exercising diligence, etc. In other words, they’re looking for a no lose situation.

I think there are a couple of Democrats who do have a “plan” of sorts like Joe Biden who is convinced the country has to be “split” so to speak among the different Muslim groups. Today he argued against Reid and called for amendments (his plan). Right or wrong, at least it’s a plan. But, Reid doesn’t want that because he fears Biden’s plan will fail.

In effect, Reid/Pelosi don’t want any Democratic party plan right now. What they want is to win the Presidency and the Congress in 2008 and that trumps everything for them.

If Reid’s resolution is only symbolic, why is the GOP so determined to defeat it?

In any case, you might be interested in Hugh Hewitt’s interview of General Odom that addresses some of the issues that have been discussed here:

WO:
We are on a path to suffer every month we stay. The defeat we face will be larger, and we will put off the time at which…and where we will have even less resources to recover. If you remember the Second World War, Hitler had 600,000 troops thrown into Stalingrad, refused over four, five months to withdraw them, at the plea by, from his generals, and he ends up losing them all. If he had withdrawn them as they said, asked him to do, and let Stalingrad go, he could have shortened his lines by seven or eight hundred kilometers, and had nearly, had over 600,000 troops survive. Now that’s…a military commander that doesn’t know when to retire from one area so he can approach the conflict from another area, is not a smart commander. And it seems to you’re advocating a kind of policy where you have a president who jumps off the Empire State Building, and he goes by the 50th floor, and he says I’m on course. Well, I want a president who knows how to change course.

…

HH: Do you believe that safe havens for al Qaeda will empower them to strike the United States again as they did on 9/11?

WO: Look, they’re getting one back in Afghanistan. They’ve got one right now in Pakistan. They’ve got them in other countries. If you get out of Iraq, there’s one thing, two or three things you can be sure of. They cannot operate effectively in Kurdistan right now. The Shiites will catch them and decapitate everyone they can get their hands on. Most Sunnis don’t like them. They deal with him largely because they provided them suicide bombers, et cetera, to take on the Shiites. With us getting out of the scene, and if the Shiites were to win that civil war, the al Qaeda will be gone.

HH: And why do you believe we haven’t been attacked since 9/11, General?

WO: I don’t think…we’ve been attacked in Iraq. They’ve been killing us left and right over there. It’s over 3,000.

HH: Why have we not been attacked in the United States since 9/11?

WO: You don’t know and I don’t know. Mr. John Miller’s done a very good study saying they don’t have the capabilities. There’s a very lot of intelligence evidence that suggests they don’t have the capabilities to do it.

As the GOP has said, it sends a message which demoralizes our troops and emboldens our our enemy. All negative. It doesn’t do anything positive, or if it does, I certainly don’t know what that is.

On the face of it, I think Biden is probably right.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1908748

I’m not the one who called it “symbolic”. Harry Reid did.

To our enemies whom this resolution emboldens, it’s anything but symbolic. To our troops whom this harms, it’s anything but symbolic.