The Strib wants you to quit saying things that hurt their feelings:

The phrase? “Cut and run.”

Anyone advocating immediate or even sometime-soon withdrawal of American troops from Iraq is apt to be accused of wanting to “cut and run,” meaning they advocate a dishonorable, cowardly retreat.

OK. Let’s be ruthlessly clear and accurate, here:

Leaving Iraq now would allow Iraq to fall even deeper into a civil war that the central government is, so far, unable to handle. We are the only power in the world that can do anything useful about this.

“Cutting and jogging” – moving our troops to Kuwait, or Okinawa, or (as the hapless, terminally-dim Amy Klobuchar posits) Afghanistan – would have the effect of taking Omaha Beach, and then withdrawing to England while we let the French sort the rest of their liberation out.

Counterinsurgency warfare is a slow, ugly grind – but it can be won, or at least resolved favorably. It takes skill. More than that, as every successful counterinsurgency in history shows us, it takes patience.

But calling for an end to a fruitless, bloody conflict to which this nation has devoted itself for 3½ years, and which shows no signs of ever ending on terms favorable to the United States, is in no way cowardly. It’s a reasonable, even brave, perspective.

“Truth is lies, Winston”.

It might be reasonable, under some circumstances – if you assume that taking a hill from the enemy and then giving it back, to be taken back again, is “reasonable”.

“Brave?” No. It is the very sort of armchair-generalship and parlor leadership that the left sniggers about when they yap about “fighting keyboardists” and “chickenhawks”. The troops – and the Iraqis that come out to vote, volunteer for the Iraqi Army and Police, and live their daily lives amid the horrors concocted by the “insurgents” – are brave. The Strib editorial board and other advocates of cutting and running are merely stating an opinion. In our nation, this is not “brave”, it’s merely par for the course, thank God.

That honorable point of view actually fits well with the original meaning of cut and run, lost now on most who use the term. In nautical battles among sailing ships, when enemy vessels were bearing down on a navy caught at anchor, the ropes to the anchors would be cut and the ships would run with the wind, thus surviving to engage the enemy on more equal terms. An admiral who cut and ran was more likely to be praised for saving his fleet than criticized for cowardice.

Since the Strib wants to invoke picayune, irrelevant bits and pieces of trivia, let’s go further. In 1973 the US – at the behest of leftists like (or, in some cases, including) the people who run the Strib’s editorial board, “cut and ran” (by whatever definition) from Vietnam. Oh, we did it with a promise – we withdrew “over the horizon” to Okinawa and our bases in the US (had Amy Klobuchar been in office, one wonders if she might have suggested we pull back to Honduras or Cuba), with a guarantee to Saigon that we wouldn’t leave them in the lurch.

And then, with full control of Congress after Watergate, they cut off both the funding and any other hope for rescue to the South Vietnamese. The killing fields, the boat exodus, and seven figures’ worth of carnage ensued.

While that example isn’t as picayune and meaningless as the Strib’s nautical excursion, it’s the best I could come up with – and it happens to be front and center on the conservatives’ conscience right now.

A case can be made for not considering withdrawing from Iraq until the conflict somehow is redeemed. But that case should be made with real arguments, not with sleazy accusations that those who advocate a different course want to “cut and run.”

We’ve given you the former, Strib Editors. And you’re going to continue to get both.