The fabulously credentialed law professor Noah Feldman concludes, by process of elimination, that a Democratic President in 2009 would wind up following a course quite similar to that of GWB. From the NYT:

On the surface, recent votes in Congress appear to signal a new Democratic determination to withdraw from Iraq. But the reality is otherwise. It is not only that the resolutions were drafted and adopted with the certain knowledge that they would be vetoed. More important, even if a future Democratic president did try to implement the new plans, the results would likely end up looking oddly similar to the Bush administration’s current strategy…

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has done everything it can to bring on a civil war, and it’s unlikely the war will end before it is defeated. Allowing the collapse of the country would, in fact, mean handing victory to the most violent jihadists — a result that would be irresponsible for any president who thought the United States was actually endangered by Islamic terrorism. Fighting Al Qaeda is as good a label as any for what we should be doing in Iraq — trying to hold off large-scale slaughter long enough to create a stable power-sharing government that would actually be worthy of the name.

Will the public, in the U.S. or Iraq, accept a continued American presence under these terms? Now that we have rediscovered that fighting with inadequate resources loses wars, the public is understandably fed up with the whole undertaking. The larger war on terror, though, is a war that most of us still believe we need to fight. To do so, we need to avoid the kind of withdrawal that would allow Al Qaeda to claim victory while simultaneously precipitating a humanitarian crisis that would destabilize the region.

Of course, Professor Feldman posits as his 2009 decision-maker a “president who thought the United States was actually endangered by Islamic terrorism.” We’ll have to see about that in due course.

But there’s quite a lot to be said for his logic that a responsible Democratic President would find herself in pretty much the same boat as the current President. In additon, we would note that an Iraq withdrawal of the Vietnam-fantasy sort is really not replayable in several ways, for example: (a) Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States are not Cambodia, and have quite a lot of influence on US actions; (b) in Vietnam, there was no al Jazeera or CNN International to cover the post-withdrawal carnage and Jihadist triumphalism, 24/7 and worldwide; and (c) Iran has other plans of its own, and it is likely to act with increasing boldness in the years ahead.

All these factors underscore as well the incredible irresponsibility of the most vehement of the anti-war crowd, who must know deep down that their words and actions can most likely have no practical outcome other than the encouragement of our enemies.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 10:20 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.