Round One

Let's be really clear about the Iraq vote coming down the pike in Congress this week.

I'm voting no on this bill. I'm tired of the false choices of Republicans and all the recycled spin of old battles and the political calculations that do nothing for our troops who bear the real costs of this war. Bottom line: we support the troops by getting the policy right, and this bill doesn't do that. I've said it again and again and I'm not about to stop: we need a deadline to force Iraqis to stand up for Iraq and bring our heroes home, not watered down benchmarks and blank check waivers for this president. We support the troops by funding the right mission, not with a White House that opposes a pay raise for our brave men and women in uniform. Do we need to bring out the hand puppets and make the case again?

Reality about this legislation is as simple as it gets: The original Senate legislation offered a roadmap to change course in Iraq. I was proud of the progress we'd made. (I've still got the scars of the lonely fight Russ Feingold and I made in the summer of 2006 when we first introduced legislation to set a deadline to redeploy combat troops and only got 11 votes. But it was perseverance, not pessimism that made that a majority position less than a year later.) I'm voting no on this new version of the supplemental because it enables the Administration and Iraqi politicians to deliver more of the same.

So what do we do now that we've hit a bump in the road? Fold up our tents? No way - doing so would be ignorant almost of the long hard legislative struggle and forceful pressure it required to get to this point. I am determined to continue pressing this issue until President Bush changes course. Why? Because we owe our troops nothing less than a strategy that is worthy of their sacrifice.

So, yes, in this fight we threw a lot of punches, and we landed a bunch, but this is a heavyweight bout. It's not going to be over in the first round, and this isn't the final bell. As Kos said yesterday over at Daily Kos:

We still haven't completely lost this Iraq supplemental battle. And if we do, instead of crying and taking your ball home, resolve to fight even harder. We owe it to our troops in Iraq, to our families, to our neighbors, to ourselves ...

This movement is about fighting for what we believe in, doing the hard work to transform both our party and our nation. It won't happen at once. We'll have to do this incrementally one issue fight and one election cycle at a time.

Changing course in Iraq is too urgent--restoring sanity and balance to our foreign policy is too important--to be anything but disappointed with where we are right now. Every day we follow this path is another day lost, another day of damage being done to our country. I fought for a new course--I'll continue to fight for a new course--and I know a lot of you fought with me. Believe me: we will win this debate the same way we clawed to this point - by never relenting in the pressure to change things.

So where do we go from here? We push from every direction we can think of. Harry Reid and I have spoken about this many times, and this supplemental was only the first avenue to begin to put pressure on the GOP. There are many other opportunities, and we will seize them all. Because, make no mistake about who makes up the other side on this one: it's the Bush White House and its GOP enablers. Now we have many, many Republicans on record as saying that September is a deadline to see how the misguided escalation is going. (So now they like deadlines?) So when September comes along, we can't let them posture their way into throwing out some new deadline we need to reach to see if anything will happen. We'll have another three months of pressure built, another season of activism to make them rethink their position.

I'm not going to call on you to do anything specific today; you've done so much already. I'm not going to ask for patience, because the truth is big policy changes like this are only achieved by impatient people - in huge numbers. I'm just telling you that I'll continue to work every single day (every damn day as my old friend Ron says) to apply pressure to change this broken policy. There will be new avenues of attack, new paths to take. But, for right now, it's up to folks like me to do our part to keep the battle going, so all of you can work to keep the pressure going. Together, we can win this, as long as we keep the battle joined. Keep punching.

{cross-posted at the the JohnKerry.com blog}