I read an article in yesterday's Times about the planned drawdown of US troops in Iraq and the shift from combat to training in many parts of the country. This is, of course, the plan advocated by the Iraq Study Group before the surge and also basically the plan that Dems have been advocating since the last election. Granted, the drawdown will only reduce troop numbers to pre-surge levels, so it hardly fulfills the the desires of the vast majority of the public that troops were to be from 2006 levels rather than the surge that was actually put into place. However, that is really neither here nor there anymore. What is an issue is that there is a big problem with the current Dem message on the war.

Everyone, left and right, knows we are trapped in Iraq in some form for a very long time to come. So, the issue of withdrawal, fast or slow, is not really as fundamental as the policy and posturing that got us there in the first place. Violence has dropped, though it remains unacceptable. It is also likely that there is really no one left to kill in most neighborhoods as the ethnic cleansing has been successful. This is a really a key point.

Certain factors have contributed to increased stability in Iraq, but our presence there is still a failure. Not because we failed to quell the violence a bit, but because we have destroyed whatever semblance of civil society Iraq ever had and have obliterated any hope of a new one developing in our lifetimes. We have replaced a state that was largely secular before the first Persian Gulf War of 1990 with a what is essentially a fundamentalist-leaning Islamic state with ties to Iran. We have the hatred and contempt of the entire Arab world.

The focus of the Dem candidates should not be to pander to the know-nothing netroots on the left, with regard to the simplistic notion of ending the war now. It should be to appeal to the masses of the American population, who are currently confused about the apparent "successes" being reported in the MSM around the country, including the Times. What these folks are not confused about is that we were manipulated into an unnecessary war by a bunch of megalomaniacs who did not make us safer at all, not to mention destroying the lives of millions of innocents (including those who have been injured, died, been internally displaced, or fled the country)...a number in the range of five million or more.

We need intelligent, rational leaders who will not lead us down a road like this again. I think any of the Dems will fit this bill, though I know many who read TPM consider HRC no better than GWB in this regard. That strikes me as a ridiculous point of view. It is hard to imagine that someone who fought hard against the Vietnam war, not through useless protests, but calculated organizing and thoughtful writing, would embark upon anything remotely like that as president. I assume you netroots folks are aware that HRC's anti-war activities are well-documented, and she is really the only one of the current Dem candidates to have fought so passionately to end our last great debacle of military adventurism. While I have no doubt that Obama would move even more strongly in this regard, I worry that he will ultimately be unelectable in many states because it will be too easy to paint him as soft on terror.