Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters posts today on the subject of the Democrats call for retreat in Iraq. He recalls that the Democrats took a similar position in 1864 when the party platform called for a negotiated peace with the Confederate States of America and a withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South. It’s standard bearer was General George McClellan, who used his military credibility to make the case that the war could not be won.

Not even during the Vietnam War did a major American party position itself to support abject retreat as a wartime political platform. For that, one has to go back to the Civil War, when the Democrats demanded a negotiated peace with the Confederate States of America and a withdrawal from the South. Celebrating the popularity of former General George McClellan, who had come from the battlefield to represent a party whose platform demanded a negotiated settlement (which McClellan later disavowed), the Confederates assumed that the war could be over within days of McClellan’s presumed victory over the controversial and hated Abraham Lincoln. Even some Republicans began to question whether Lincoln should stand for reelection–until Sherman took Atlanta and exposed McClellan as a defeatist and an incompetent of the first order.

Murtha’s demand for a pullout gave the party’s leadership a chance to openly embrace defeatism, much as McClellan did for Northern Democrats in 1864, using McClellan’s field experience for the credibility to argue that the American Army could not hope to defeat the enemy it faced.

History is a funny thing, isn’t it?

Howard Dean is the standard bearer for the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, that standard is now a white flag.