Defeatists in Congress, says Mark Steyn, are openly drafting a strategy against the president that "denies him victory and absolves them of any responsibility for defeat." As if to help, the Washington Post article Steyn excerpts states that "The idea is to slowly choke off the war by stopping the deployment of troops from units that have been badly degraded by four years of combat."
Under judgment intended to derogate it, the United States military is either unprepared for a kind of combat, in this case counterterrorism; or, in the words of the article, "badly degraded" once it has engaged in earnest. Whatever metric is applied to degradation, or at which degree it is concluded bad, is not explained. And when the factions of the enemy are alternately rumored and ascertained to have joined, incorporated, disbanded and reorganized many times since the fall of Saddam Hussein, does the absence of affiliative integrity — let alone the absence of the majority of a cell or gang, due to the incarceration or death of its members — designate them as "terribly degraded" or "irretrievably degraded"? Or is no one on Capitol Hill, or the press, scrutinizing the other side for weaknesses?
Americans once suffered losses in war totaling nearly half a million but five years before they committed soldiers for three more years, and lost fifty thousand more. About one-seventh of a percentage point of 1.5 million deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, three thousand plus, have been killed in four years. Morale is evidently robust and soldiers are returning to each theater so their country and its allies can achieve victory. Whose sensitivity has intervened? The congressman's.