The Senate’s twin votes this week on the war put the mid-terms next year into sharp focus. The Senate voted 58-40 against a measure introduced by Sen. Carl Levin that would have set up a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, and voted in favor of a more vague measure that merely suggests that the Bush administration clarify a few things about the war and when we might expect to see our troops start coming home.

That’s the line across which next year’s mids will be fought. The Democrats, including “moderate” Hillary Clinton, voted en masse to withdraw by the end of 2006, no matter what’s going on in Iraq at the time. Clinton’s vote was a reversal of her previous stand, which was explicitly against setting out any withdrawal timetables. The Republicans explicitly rejected setting any such timetable in place, as they have consistently done in public statements.

The Republicans are right on this for several reaons. First, setting a timetable tells the terrorists how long they have to hold out before they’ll face a much less formidable military than ours. Iraq’s military is gaining ground fast in capability, but it’s just not yet as battle hardened or as well trained as the US Army and Marines. Second, a timetable sets up a defeat tripwire. If things go south and we have to legislatively undo the timetable, the terrorists will rightly see that as a defeat for us and the press will spin it that way. In post-modern wars like this one, the impression of defeat is almost as good as the real thing. Third, a timetable signals to the Iraqis that we will leave them high and dry, and it signals to the Iranians and other potential enemies that we can be chased out by a patient enemy, even from a war that we are winning. Somalia taught our enemies a similar lesson; Iraq was supposed to undo that lesson. A timetable would re-inforce the Somalia lesson.

Republicans would be wise to first defeat the Bush LIED lie (Just Google It would help, along with the pushback they’re already doing). Having dispatched that Democrat tactic, they should then fight the mid-terms along the Levin amendment fault line, asking the American people “Do you want to give our enemies a reason to fight on, or do you want to defeat them?”

ON THE OTHER HAND, Andy McCarthy reports that the Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Lindsay Graham, have voluntarily surrendered their right to claim superiority over the Democrats in national security matters. They have voted to confer Constitutional rights upon the Gitmo terrorists, granting them access to appeals in federal courts after military commissions have convicted them. This is unprecedented foolishness, and may over time destroy both the commander-in-chief’s ability to prosecute wars and may erode the definition of legal and illegal combatant to the point that they are indistinguishable. And it opens the door to nearly anyone in the world claiming rights under the US Constitution–even people who have committed their lives to destroying our nation. A Democrat majority would have passed a worse measure that the Republicans shot down last week, but passing that bill wouldn’t have been dramatically worse.