Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes NO Sense
By: Winston Smith

Democrats are caught in a Rove-spun conundrum: if you are against the war then you can only want to bring all the troops home and allow the terrorist to take over Iraq. Like so many of George Bush’s Orwellian-styled Newspeak statements, this one is also false.

The first fallacy is that we want to allow the terrorists to take over Iraq. They already have. There are 20,000 of them and between 130,000 and 150,000 of us, and they have fought us to a standstill. They have killed or wounded 20,000 of our soldiers, so they are very good soldiers. They have no command and control, no tanks or planes, yet they can move and attack at will. Their Sunni political allies have monkey-wrenched the constitutional process, and the proposed constitution will be meaningless whether it passes or not. If it does not pass, there will be no ‘2nd Constitutional Convention.’ Civil war will break out nationwide, instead of just the current skirmishing. Shi’ites will take off their gloves, Kurds will declare their independence, and- through no fault of their own- the 20,000 Americans dead and wounded will have fought a losing cause, just as they had in Vietnam.

The second fallacy is that the only alternative to keeping them in Iraq is to bring them home.

Which brings me to the third alternative: we’re not done yet. In 2003 Rumsfeld began moving troops from the Afghan theater into Iraq, leaving behind the one person of whom we are sure attacked us. Many of his minions remained behind; since then, they have rubbed our nose in the fact that they are still around. Now, I have no way of knowing how many soldiers it would take to kill Osama Bin Laden and his Taliban patrons, but I’m sure some general somewhere deep in the bowels of the Pentagon somewhere could figure it out. Maybe 50,000, maybe 100,000- whatever. Send that many back to Afghanistan to finish the mission, and send the rest home. When the job is done and Osama is rotting in a ditch somewhere, then bring the rest home.

If the Democratic Party needs to find a position, this might be as good as it gets.