COMMENTARY: When The Going Gets Tough, Feinstein's Knees Get Weak

COMMENTARY: When The Going Gets Tough, Feinstein's Knees Get Weak

Posted on March 28, 2006

When The Going Gets Tough, Feinstein's Knees Get Weak
by Sen. Richard Mountjoy (ret.)

So General Dianne Feinstein wants President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and pull our troops out of Iraq. It doesn't matter to Feinstein that under Rumsfeld's leadership, we toppled one of the world's most dangerous regimes and transformed Saddam Hussein from bloodthirsty despot into one more murderer waiting his turn with the executioner.

When it was the politically popular thing to do, Feinstein voted to give the President the power to use military force against Iraq. When our troops quickly defeated Hussein, she found nothing to criticize in the policies of President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld. But when the going got tough, Feinstein's knees got weak. Now she wants to "transition the mission." That's a politically correct way of saying she wants to take the coward's way out -- to "cut and run", to leave the good people of Iraq at the mercy of merciless terrorists who murder children on their way to school.

In 2002, as she was voting for the resolution authorizing war against Saddam Hussein, Feinstein understood the issue well. She spoke of the "terror that Saddam Hussein has sown" and described him as a "consequential threat." Now she relies on the "devil made me do it defense." She only voted for war because she was misled by the White House, Feinstein says. The truth is that her vote was guided by the public opinion polls. Now the polls have swung the other way and so has Feinstein.

"Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear weapons, poison gas or biological weapons." Perhaps that's the kind of statement that misled Feinstein. There's just one problem: those are the words, not of George W. Bush in 2002 but of Bill Clinton in 1998 when he unleashed air strikes on Iraq.

Clinton quickly ended his mini-war, a brief distraction from Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment for perjury and other high crimes and misdemeanors. After four days of bombing, Clinton went back to mapping his impeachment defense, and Saddam Hussein returned to business as usual. And for Saddam that means invading his neighbors - Iran first, then Kuwait - and murdering his own people with poison gas.

In 2003, President George Bush had the courage to finish the business left unfinished by Bill Clinton. President Bush believed - just as Bill Clinton had believed - that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But unlike Clinton, he was determined to disarm Hussein once and for all.
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We will never know whether Hussein still had his weapons of mass destruction. He may have slipped them out of the country before the war or they may lie hidden in the vast deserts of Iraq. But this we do know: Saddam Hussein will never again threaten anyone - not America, not the innocent children, not the women and men of his own country.

None of this makes any difference to Dianne Feinstein. One again, she is taking her lead from the polls. She thinks the war is unpopular. So she has the "courage" to call for the firing of Donald Rumsfeld and to criticize the President's terrorist surveillance program. Perhaps she will join her fellow Democrats in calling for the censure of President Bush.

Go right ahead, Senator Feinstein. You're a United States senator. You can introduce any legislation you wish. Introduce a censure resolution. Introduce a bill to end the terrorist surveillance program. Put it to a vote. Let Feinstein and all the Democrats run on the "cut and run" platform this year. Then we'll see what the American people really think about the war.

No matter how she tries to hide it, Feinstein is a member of the left wing of the Democrat Party. She'll slide toward the center when it's politically convenient but she always moves back to her true home on the far left of American politics. For Feinstein and her friends on the radical left, what's good for the American people is bad for them.

They believe they can only win the next election if America loses this war - a war that Feinstein authorized by her vote in 2002.

Fortunately, for the American people and the Iraqi people, George Bush doesn't take advice - about his Secretary of Defense or anything else - from Feinstein and Friends. He will not surrender. We will win this war.

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