Brendan Miniter:

The Murtha resolution was intended to allow Democrats to have their cake and eat it too--to oppose the war while confusing the issue by pretending to support the war's aims of a free and democratic Iraq. Instead of fighting on the ground staked out by Democrats, Republicans chose clarity. Mr. Hunter introduced a simple, one-paragraph resolution calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Late Friday night the House voted the resolution down 403-3.

Anyone who thinks that vote was simply cheap political theater and not connected to the larger debate on how to fight the war on terror hasn't been watching Mr. Hunter and the other defense hawks in the House over the past four years. It's not an accident that the House hasn't passed the "torture ban" that John McCain and John Warner pushed through the Senate. Nor is it a coincidence that intelligence reform stalled in the House last year until it was amended to insure that troops in the field would still have the intelligence they need.

It's not lost on Mr. Hunter, or on Reps. Steve Buyer, John Kline and many others, that Iraq is the most visible front in the war on terror and is therefore a symbol for whether the political elites of this nation have what it takes to confront global terrorist networks. If politicians can't stomach going after terrorists who openly attack U.S. soldiers, they won't have what it takes to go after terrorists who hide in some of the most remote or ungoverned reaches of the world.