DoublePlusUnGood

"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

Although that quote is 15 years old, change the tense from past to present and it could have been said by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi , the man claiming responsibility for the majority of bloodshed in Iraq today. As happend following the Tet Offensive in 1968, our nation's Senators seem to be losing their stomach for the task at hand in Iraq. It is one thing to have not supported the war from the onset--everybody is entitled to their opinion. It is quite another thing to change your story at this point in the game as many formerly pro-war Senators from both sides of the asile are doing; even if it is the politically expedient thing to do. It is quite another thing altogether to do as former President Clinton did when he told a group of students recently at the American University in Dubai that the Bush Administration had committed a "big mistake" by liberating Iraq. "Saddam is gone. It's a good thing, but I don't agree with what was done," said the former President.

This is the same man who in 1998 made regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy when he signed the Iraq Liberation Act.

Why would so many politicians go to such lengths to change their story? Victor Davis Hanson thinks he knows why:

...what then is really at the heart of the current strange congressional hysteria?
Simple — the tragic loss of nearly 2,100 Americans in Iraq.
The "my perfect war, your messy postbellum reconstruction" crowd is now huge and unapologetic. It encompasses not just leftists who once jumped on the war bandwagon in fears that Democrats would be tarred as weak on national security (a legitimate worry), but also many saber-rattling conservatives and Republicans — including those (the most shameful of all) who had in earlier times both sent letters to President Clinton and Bush demanding the removal of Saddam and now damn their commander-in-chief for taking them at their own word.
In the triumphalism after seeing Milosevic go down without a single American death, the Taliban implode at very little cost, and Saddam removed from power with little more than 100 fatalities, there was the assumption that the United States could simply nod and dictators would quail and democracy would follow. Had we lost 100 in birthing democracy and not 2,000, or seen purple fingers only and not IEDs on Dan Rather's nightly broadcasts, today's critics would be arguing over who first thought up the idea of removing Saddam and implementing democratic changes.
So without our 2,100 losses, nearly all the present critics would be either silent or grandstanding their support — in the manner that three quarters of the American population who polled that they were in favor of the war once they saw the statue of Saddam fall.
In short, there is no issue of WMD other than finding out why our intelligence people who had once missed it in the First Gulf War, then hyped it in the next — or what actually happened to all the unaccounted for vials and stockpiles that the U.N. inspectors swore were once inside Iraq.
So the real crux is a real legitimate debate over whether our ongoing costs-billions spent, thousands wounded, nearly 2,100 American soldiers lost-will be worth the results achieved. Post facto, no death seems "worth it". The premature end of life is tangible and horrendous in a way that the object of such soldiers' sacrifices — a reformed Middle East, a safer world, enhanced American safety, and freedom for 26 million — seems remote and abstract.

The reason of this post is to point out the revision of history that is taking place before our eyes in the Senate. You, the reader, would do well to recall or read George Orwell's 1984. In it he describes the Records Department where the protagonist Winston works revising old news stories to reinforce Big Brother's version of history. Inconvenient facts as well as any stray piece of anything were tossed into the Memory Hole, never to be referenced again. Judging from the Senate's behavior of late, I'd say it must have been on their Summer reading list.

Side Note: Military deaths are as tragic at the individual level as any death. In an attempt to keep perspective on things I came up with what I think is a good demographic comparison to our Armed Forces: motorcycle riders. They're mostly young and mostly male just like a soldier afterall.
Single vehicle motorcycle crashes account for about 45 percent of all motorcyclist fatalities. More than 38,000 motorcyclists have died in single vehicle motorcycle crashes between 1975 and 1999. (Source)
If you do the math that works out to a little over 2,000 deaths per year. I realize this is not an exact comparison as the number of U.S. soldiers that have been killed in Iraq spans almost three years, and surely there's more motorcycle riders than soldiers in Iraq so the sample size is different. However, if you look at it strictly in deaths per year, riding a motorcycle is more dangerous than soldiering in Iraq.