Not getting it, liberal style
Now that the Stupid Party has, once again, lived up to its name by completely buckling on the tiny part of the "more money for Halliburton!" bill that might require that the Coward in Chief either (a) shit or (b) get off the pot, many liberal weblogs (at least of the ones I read) are leaping up to say "look, this proves it! The Democrats are a pro-war party! Told you so!"
Umm, with all due respect, that's complete nonsense. The Democrats might be a pro-war party (there's certainly a large subset of the elected representatives who believe that the Democratic Party is on the side of the angels if it restricts the government torturers to one fingernail per hand,) or they might be an anti-war party, or they might be some sort of party that is not classifiable, but that's not relevant to their latest Chamberlain moment.
The thing is that in the end they are a political party, and like any other bureaucracy (Charlie Stross mentioned somewhere that he thought that corporations are the first example of a non-human intelligence. He's off by several thousand years; a corporation is merely a bureaucracy with legal rights, and whatever sentience a corporation has was already there when the bureacracy existed without legal support) a healthy political party wants to survive and prosper.
And to prosper, a political party needs to show that it can defeat other political parties. So the Democrats, even if they were an even more gung-ho "kill the gooks(tm) and package their intestines as organic sausage casings!" than the Evil Party, should be doing exactly what the Evil Party did when Bill Clinton was president and going into screaming conniption fits about The! Nerve! of the DEMOCRATS engaging in a horrible unjustified war. The inexplicable (but completely predictable) spectacle of the Stupid Party hooking the Coward in Chief on the same line that the Evil Party tried to use on Clinton, then giving up and letting the B*sh junta get out of the trap has nothing to do with any pro-war leanings of the party, but has everything to do with their inability to actually govern.
If the Democratic Party is pro-war, there are plenty of places where they can make their defense contractor friends wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Iraq is not the only sandbox in the playground, and a warmonger would not be disappointed if the USA quit Iraq on the spot and rotated the armed forces back into Afghanistan, where an additional 170k troops might actually be enough to force the Taliban into a surrender. Remember that the only reason the United States did the unprovoked aggressive war against Iraq was because Maximum Leader Genius had some sort of bizarre fetish for repeating Daddy's war. There's nothing in there for the Democrats, and sawing off the B*sh junta with pious cries of "oh, I don't know why the President DOESN'T SUPPORT THE TROOPS in Iraq. We keep passing bills that give TWICE AS MUCH money as B*sh asked for, but he keeps vetoing them. I guess he DOESN'T SUPPORT THE TROOPS and would rather LOSE THE WAR than properly fund it" would, even in these days when the mainstream media is controlled by Evil Party stooges, get a good reception with the 70-odd% of the American Public that would rather the USA get the fuck out of Dodge now. What's better here; wars without end, OR wars without end PLUS the ignoble defeat of the Evil Party?
A pro-war political party with even the slightest self-preservation instinct would choose option 1, because their first priority should be to crush their political opponents. The fact that the Democratic Party is incapable of realising this (and, yes, I am aware that some individual members of the Stupid Party opposed the Chamberlain revision of the war funding bill. But institutionally the party did not realise that letting the Evil Party founder on the rocks of the B*sh junta's stubborness) doesn't make them pro-war, it makes them STUPID, even in the context where I routinely call them the Stupid Party.
I'm sure that for some people it's comforting to believe that political parties are some sort of superhuman beings that never make mistakes (shoot, there are still people out there who are believe in stupid conspiracy theories about the destruction of the WTC,) but those people are fools. The Democratic Party doesn't habitually sabotage their own plans because they're some sort of implacable pro-war monolith; they continually sabotage their own plans because they're too stupid to plan more than 30 seconds ahead.