After months of denying that they were about to cut off funding for the troops or impose a rigid timeline for a withdrawal from Iraq, the Democrats in Congress are about to do just that. It’s not entirely surprising for those who lived through the Vietnam War and have watched with dismay the isolationist drift of the Democratic Party, particularly its congressional wing identified with George McGovern, since then. What is surprising, though, is what our Eli Lake is reporting are to be the triggers for an American retreat. Mr. Lake reports that the bill being proposed by the Democrats in the House would impose a retreat by America if Iraqis fail to attain such targets as “the repeal of a de-Baathification law and the passage of a plan to share the country’s oil revenues.”

Well, that about sums it up. When the Democrats controlled the White House during the Nuremberg trials, they didn’t object to de-Nazification. When the Democrats controlled Congress during the end of the Cold War, they didn’t object to the processes of lustration that occurred in the former Warsaw Pact countries and that Tina Rosenberg memorably described in her National Book Award-winning volume, “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” American troops were on the ground in Europe, their lives on the line, in both cases. The appropriate level of punishment of those involved with a regime as evil as Saddam’s Baath Party, or, for that matter, the Nazis or the communists or the apartheid regime in South Africa is certainly a topic on which reasonable people can differ, and different people may give different weight to the sometimes-divergent goals of justice and reconciliation. But the idea of the American Congress, led by the Democratic Party, swinging in on the side of leniency for the Baathists is an act worthy of the party’s history as the refuge of the Confederates in the American Civil War.

That the Democrats should command the Iraqis to nationalize and distribute their oil revenues is another stunner. We recall a Democratic governor, Ann Richards, presiding over the oil-rich state of Texas without passing a law mandating the sharing of the state’s oil revenues. Nor have the Democratic speaker of the House and majority leader of the Senate — yet — come up with a plan to shut down ExxonMobil and the other American oil companies and share their revenues. At least the Democrats aren’t ordering the Iraqis to get out of the oil business altogether and start generating energy by some more environmentally friendly method. Wait for that in the Gore administration. The Democrats are fond of lecturing President Bush about how he shouldn’t alienate our allies. It is just arrogant for these congressmen to sit in Washington and give the constitutionally and democratically elected Iraqis orders about how to run their government.

It is beyond us how American soldiers are made any safer by making the Iraqi government look like an American puppet and ordering it from afar to be more lenient on those who collaborated with the vicious regime of Saddam Hussein. Just as illogical is the idea that an American retreat is an appropriate lever with which to threaten the Iraqis. If America leaves, the ones who will really suffer in Iraq won’t be the few politicians blocking progress on whatever oil distribution or re-Baathification law Speaker Pelosi wants passed, but millions of innocent Iraqis and those in neighboring countries whose security would suffer. As President Bush asked the other day, do we really want to leave and see Iraq turn into another state like Afghanistan before September 11, a place where terrorist groups run the country and it is used as a base to plot attacks against America and New York?

Morris Amitay, a Scoop Jackson Democrat who is vice chairman of the Jewish Institute for National Affairs, did everyone a service yesterday when he asked Senator Clinton, the Democratic Party’s frontrunner in the 2008 presidential race and one of its most hawkish voters on foreign policy issues, whether America “should win” this war that we are in. Mrs. Clinton would not say yes. Mr. Amitay told The New York Sun’s Russell Berman afterward, “I was very disappointed that in the war we are now in against a ruthless enemy she could quote President Roosevelt to the effect that we are all in this struggle, but she would not say whether we should win it.” It is a disappointment not only to those in Iraq and elsewhere in countries not yet free, but also to those in America who had hoped that with the accession of Senator Clinton’s husband, the Democratic Party had vanquished the ghosts of McGovern. Mr. Clinton, after the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, said he met with the families of the victims. “They made it clear to me they did not want us to give in to terror or to turn inward or retreat,” President Clinton said then. “Instead, they urged us to stand strong, as ever, for freedom and democracy in all countries and for all people.” Words on which the defeatist Democrats might reflect.