Well, it made for good rhetoric anyway.

At the President's 2006 Dinner on Monday, he made (at the end of paragraph 18 of the news release) the following statement:

It is important to have members of the United States Congress who will not wave the white flag of surrender in this war on terror.

Matt Lauer of NBC asked White House consel Dan Bartlett about it on Wednesday and asked him to name ONE member of Congress who had advocated that we 'wave the white flag of surrender.' Bartlett couldn't name one. Because none have.

There are a growing number in Congress who believe, as I do, that there is nothing at all to be gained by our remaining in Iraq, and that sooner or later the country created by colonial powers and made up of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who have little in common and were only held together forcibly by a dictator, is likely to divide into three smaller countries and that fighting the inevitable is as futile as the attempts a decade ago to try and hold the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia together by force. These members of Congress have not simply suggested that we lay down our weapons and leave, but rather that we set a deadline which would give the Iraqi army, (though fighting a futile cause as it is) time to take over for us (lest anyone think they are serious about this without a deadline, they give their members a week of vacation per month-- something our troops could scarecely dream of-- because they know as long as the Bush policy is in place, when things get tough, the Americans will do all their fighting for them.)

What I see is a plan for withdrawal from being stuck in a civil war that we can stay in until the cows come home without winning, not a surrender. I had hoped that Bush would take the opportunity presented by the death of Zarqawi to announce a withdrawal (declare victory and get out) but apparently he was not willing to do so. This does not involve surrendering to anyone, and it is interesting that when you hear this sort of rhetoric, asking people to name names seems to calm it down right away. They accuse in general, but they can't find a specific individual who fits the accusation.