Wednesday, June 21, 2006 | 7:14 a.m.
Since Saddam Hussein was captured and a weak new government was formed, the main news from Iraq has not been about progress but about how many of our troops were killed compared to how many terrorists and insurgents were killed, and also about how many civilians were killed in the latest suicide bombing.
How much longer can Congress sit idly by while this Vietnam-like status persists in Iraq? Republican leaders have forsaken urgently needed policy change for mindless sloganeering against critics - "Stay the course," "Surrendering is not a solution," "We cannot cut and run."
As a way of jolting the Republican majority out of its wartime lethargy and stimulating actual debate, most Democrats this week are supporting a resolution calling for a phased withdrawal of troops from the war zone.
The resolution, if passed, would be advisory. It doesn't put a number on how many troops should be redeployed this year, and it doesn't establish a timetable for withdrawal of all 130,000 U.S. troops. It does, however, ask President Bush to provide Congress with a plan for "continued redeployment" in 2006. It also calls for Bush and the Pentagon to prepare a plan for shifting the role of coalition forces from direct combat to the training of Iraqi troops.
Why the Republicans continue to criticize Democrats for wanting to debate an alternative policy on Iraq is baffling. The Bush administration's two-pronged policy is essentially the same as that which failed in Vietnam.
It plans to win by attrition, or by killing more of the enemy than it kills of us. And, in a repeat of the "Vietnamization policy," it wants U.S. troops, while engaged in deadly combat of their own, to train Iraqis to defend their own deeply divided country.
A war of attrition has no end. The killing on both sides just keeps mounting. And training Iraqis while at the same time fighting a full-scale insurgency could take decades. After three years of this policy, there are not enough Iraqi troops to independently defend their country for five minutes. In fact, the Pentagon has stopped reporting the number of Iraqi troops who are ready to fight on their own. Its last report, in February, was that there were zero Iraqi units ready to take on the enemy by themselves.
On Monday, the same day that the bodies of two U.S. soldiers missing since Friday were discovered amid booby traps, Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated his statement of a year ago that the Iraq insurgency is in its "last throes."
Such rhetoric from the White House is becoming more than tiresome. It is becoming a critical issue of competency that Congress urgently needs to address. We hope the Democrats' resolution this week provokes a thoughtful policy debate, one devoid of banal slogans.
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