The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, is being all too modest. The majority leader, Harry Reid, charges the Kentuckian is trying to stifle debate about Iraq on the Senate floor. Mr. McConnell insists he is doing nothing of the sort.

No, no. “The Republican side of the aisle is ready for this debate. We’re anxious to have it,” he said in the pre-debate about the nonbinding, pro-funding, anti-surge resolution. “We’re not trying to stop this debate.

We’re trying to structure it in a way that is fair to all the competing voices.”

Mr. McConnell has temporarily blocked a scheme of his colleagues to discuss the abandonment of the 6 million people we briefly liberated in Baghdad.

Because the legislative calendar is what it is, the minority leader has prevented a vote on a resolution telling our soldiers the mission they are now preparing to launch is futile. For this work, Americans should thank him.

Mr. McConnell, after all, has to contend with the fact that at least 10 out of his 49 senators have said with varying degrees of enthusiasm that they would like to go on record opposing the president’s modest and last-ditch proposal to protect Sunni civilians from Shiite Cossacks going house to house in Baghdad.

Lately even Senator Brownback, the Republican floor leader against the Darfur genocide, has been parroting Democratic talk of “political solutions.” When Mr. Brownback was in Baghdad, he says, Sunni and Shiite leaders didn’t even want us to send troops.

Mr. Reid and his colleagues call the surge an “escalation,” and say that it fails to pressure adequately the government of Nouri al-Maliki. In the words of the Iraq Study Group’s co-commissioner, Lee Hamilton, “Quite frankly, I’ve lost my patience with Maliki. And I think we’ve got to put the screws on this fellow.”

Mr. Hamilton meant the expression metaphorically, to allude to some leverage that America does not have. Mr. Maliki today is making preparations for when American soldiers exit Iraq. Hence he has done next to nothing to prevent his co-religionists from taking actual screws, drills, and power tools to the kneecaps and foreheads of civilians.

Any senators who suggest that America gains leverage to prevent this cleansing in Iraq’s capital by announcing that troops must withdraw from Baghdad are lying to themselves and the American people.

Because of the failures of the American occupation and the sabotage of foreign actors, America is obliged at this moment to protect Iraqi citizens from warring death squads. In Baghdad, the health ministry belongs to Muqtada al-Sadr. If America leaves Baghdad, it means his thugs will stay in the hospitals and deny any health services to Sunnis.

The surge today is to protect Zayuna and Ghadie neighborhoods from the Mahdi Army and the local police, who have for the last half-year gone home to home offering families a choice: leave in 24 hours or we kill you.

The scale of this cleansing is staggering. According to the International Organization for Migration, there are now 1.5 million internally displaced Iraqis. They live in tents in abandoned factories and other such camps reminiscent of the kinds of humanitarian disasters Democrats and Christian conservatives usually urge our government to prevent.

One gets the impression that deep down Democrats like Senators Clinton and Obama know this. Hence, the debate the Republicans stalled is only a symbolic one. The actual surge in Baghdad, aimed at clearing and holding neighborhoods and protecting the real victims of this civil war, will not be stopped by the rhetorical winds unleashed by the surge speeches Mr. Reid promises are coming.

But in exchange for their new anti-war positions, they’ve lost all credibility on, say, Darfur. One cannot, with a straight face, support the prevention of ethnic killings in a country where we lack troops, but oppose such a prevention in a country where we have them.

Senators like Joseph Biden, who once made the case for our efforts to stop Slobodan Milosevic from slaughtering Kosovo’s Albanians have lost most of the moral authority they had by failing to offer their own plan to stop the mass murder in Baghdad. John Edwards, a multi-millionaire lawyer who voted cheerfully for what he called a liberation, now discredits himself at the start of his presidential campaign.

The betrayal caucus will not for now stop funding for our military’s plan to save Baghdad. They can, however, embolden those who are perpetrating what may well come to be seen as a genocide. The only Democrat today with a right to talk about using American strength to prevent genocide, Senator Lieberman, said on the floor Monday, “What we say here is being heard in Baghdad by Iraqi moderates, trying to decide whether the Americans will stand with them.

“We are being heard by our men and women in uniform, who will be interested to know whether we support the plan they have begun to carry out. We are being heard by the leaders of the thuggish regimes in Iran and Syria, and by Al Qaeda terrorists, eager for evidence that America’s will is breaking. And we are being heard across America by our constituents, who are wondering if their Congress is capable of serious action, not just hollow posturing.”

elake@nysun.com