Moderates and the Iraq War

I don't think there is a good outcome for the United States in the Iraq War.  Bush has created a no-win situation.

I'm inclined to favor some version of setting a date and implementing a phase-out of the US presence as being the least bad of a bunch of bad options.  But even "least bad" could mean something more-or-less catastrophic.

Still, that's an abstract intellectual exercise at the moment.  Bush and Cheney have no intention of leaving any time soon.  And even if they did, I don't see any evidence that they are trying to lay the groundwork for any kind of realistic exit strategy.  They're going to ride that tiger all the way to January 2009, the way it looks now.

Tom Hayden, one of the best-known opponents of the Vietnam War and now a critic of Bush's Mesopotamian adventure, makes a good point about the "moderates" on this issue:

Centrists are so blinded by their paradigms that they cannot grasp the logic of withdrawal from Iraq. They cannot see that the Pentagon faces an insoluble recruitment crisis (unless the draft is resumed, a risky venture for Bush). They cannot see American deaths since they are never photographed in the mainstream media. They cannot see that $1 billion per week for Iraq is real money, not a write-off. They cannot see that the “coalition of the willing” is disintegrating over Iraq, the latest wounded being Blair and Berlusconi. They cannot absorb polls showing that two-thirds of Iraqis want a near-term withdrawal, or that 100,000 Iraqis recently marched for US withdrawal on the streets of Baghdad. Above all, being a centrist requires that while you acknowledge that the Iraq War was a “mistake”, you agonize over whether it would be a bigger “mistake” to withdraw, while the “mistake” continues to bleed. The centrists wait for an “exit strategy” while Donald Rumsfeld brags that America doesn’t have one. (Iraq: A Bipartisan Call to Return Politics to the Homefront Huffington Post 05/27/05)

As I said, I don't think setting a deadline for a US exit is a good option.  But I think he makes the point here that too many people are still trying to pretend to themselves that there are some good options left.

It would be hard for me to argue with this part of Hayden's assessment:

The truth is that we were deceived into going to war. The truth is that there is no exit strategy. The truth is that we are running out of troops. The truth is that Americans are giving up their sons and daughters (over 300 young women dead in Iraq) for a mistake. The truth is that we are stealing from our children’s future by a war based on deficits. The truth is that we have squandered our reputation. The truth is that we have been lied to, or in the doublespeak of General Myers, the pre-war “intelligence” didn’t “mean something is true.”