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The Dem party keeps saying "we support the troops" because so many of them and their predecessors treated Vietnam soldiers and vets very poorly, and now they are correctly ashamed of that and don't want to repeat the mistake. Learning from history is a good thing. At least that much - that you don't shit on someone who is in the way of a bullet on behalf of his country - did sink in. Good for them. Just as the isolationist right learned its lesson from WW2.
What troubles me about all this is that, whether you agree with the decision to go to war in Iraq or not, once the country is committed to it there should be only one acceptable result, and that is victory. I know that is a very Jacksonian point of view, but Andrew Jackson was one of the more successful presidents. Rumsfeld tried fighting the war on the cheap, no one called him on it - and now that the folly is exposed, instead of correcting the error, Congress is standing on the sidelines tossing rotten tomatoes. What is especially troubling is that to my eyes it looks like domestic political wrangling seems to be taking precedence over national security. If we end up with a new terror base in Mesopotamia, it is not going to help the next president even if s/he is a Democrat. Accepting anything less than success in Iraq is going to come back to bite us.
In the end, Colin Powell was right: never go to war unless you go in with overwhelming force and have a well-thought-out exit plan. In this war we didn't do either of those things. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't fix it. If you do a war, do it to win. Otherwise don't do it. If we're not fixed on winning, bring the troops home now, this minute.
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