Lawrence Kaplan of The New Republic, interestingly enough, delivers a few body shots and a couple of solid upper cuts to the chins of the Last Helicopter crowd. His column is so good and so important, especially given that TNR is a reliably liberal journal, that I've taken the liberty of reproducing most of it here:
..."If you think it's bad now," Bush said at a recent press conference, "imagine what Iraq would look like if the United States leaves before this government can defend itself." To which a headline in The Washington Post offered this typical response: "Bush's new argument: it could be worse."
Whatever its political uses, Bush's new argument happens to be true. Yet the moral cost of abandoning a country we have turned inside-out seems not to have made the slightest impression on opinion-makers. To the extent that ethical considerations factor into the debate at all, it's usually in favor of a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. Mostly, though, the debate over leaving has been conducted in the sterile language of geopolitics, credibility, and "misallocated" resources.
This heartlessness of the withdrawal argument responds to multiple needs that are largely unrelated to Iraq. It comforts the sensibilities of opinion-makers who have a distaste for this administration's foreign policy and so don't seem to feel much stake in its human consequences. It testifies to the consistency of those who, having opposed sending U.S. forces to Iraq in the first place, see nothing problematic about pulling them out today. And it offers assurance that, but for the bungled U.S. occupation, Iraq can only be better off. No one has espoused this last view more vigorously than Democratic Representative John Murtha. His summary of the situation in Iraq amounts to this: We are the problem.
Facts on the ground suggest Murtha has things exactly backward....The truth is that, as the war takes a sectarian turn, the Americans have become more buffer and lifeline than belligerent. Earlier this year at his home near the Syrian border, Abdullah Al Yawar, a Sunni sheik in Nineveh province, warned me that "if the Americans leave, there will be rivers of blood." Hundreds of miles to the east in Baghdad, Sheikh Humam Hamoudi, one of Iraq's most powerful Shia, echoed the fear of his Sunni counterpart: Without the Americans, he said, Baghdad will become another Beirut.
With militiamen loose in their streets, even the Sunni residents of insurgent strongholds now look to the Americans as their protectors. During a recent U.S. operation in Baghdad's Amiriyah neighborhood, terrified Iraqis emerged into alleys to beg for the Americans to stay. As one put it, "If you leave, every people here will kill each other." Fully 88 percent of its residents claim to feel safest in the presence of the Americans, and for good reason: Far from the reactionary enterprise imagined by so many Americans, the U.S. military is the most progressive force in Iraq.
None of this jibes with the clich� that "redeploying United States troops is necessary for success in Iraq," as Senator John Kerry has put it. But, for the likes of Kerry, what happens after the United leaves Iraq is beside the point; by then, the troops will be safely home. Withdrawal advocates who wear the position on their sleeves as if it were a badge of heightened moral awareness seem to forget that, as theologian Kenneth Himes wrote in Foreign Policy, "The moral imperative during the occupation is Iraqi well-being, not American interests." Having invoked just-war tradition to oppose the war's cause, they completely disregard its relevance to the war's conduct--namely, the obligation to repair what the United States has smashed.
Why is it, then, that so many of those who demanded action in the Balkans, and now demand it in Darfur, cannot accept that our role in having created Iraq's humanitarian crisis imposes a special obligation to do right there? If anything, advocates of an immediate withdrawal seem to believe the reverse is true. They speak of the Iraqi people as though the entire population has been tainted--marred by its involvement in what Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid mocks as "George Bush's war." Thus has it become permissible for political operatives to tar one Iraqi prime minister as an American "puppet" and for politicians to boycott the congressional address of another and--responding in kind to the juvenile arguments of Republican operatives--write off the whole enterprise as a partisan joke.
Where all this leads is clear. Having gone into Iraq under the banner of idealism, we will abandon it in the name of cold-blooded realism. Never mind the thousands of Iraqis who assisted the Americans and could well be doomed. Never mind that, in the enemy's imagination, entire peoples--Iraq's Christian population, among others--belong to this category. Iraq's liberals, too--like Mithal Al Allusi, a decent man who heeded our summons to build a new Iraq and saw his two sons murdered for his sins--will be erased. The secular, the nonsectarian, the pro-Western voices--these will be quieted as well. Nor should they look to the United States for refuge. Having enshrined in official policy the fiction that persecution went away with Saddam, the United States has all but sealed its borders to Iraqis in search of asylum.
If the whole rotten business seems familiar, that's because it is. At the height of the debate over withdrawing from Vietnam, the Post editorialized: "The threatened bloodbath is less ominous than a continuation of the current bloodletting." About the impending departure of the Americans from Southeast Asia, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis had this to say: "Some will find the whole bloodbath debate unreal. What future possibility could be more terrible than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now?" Then, as now, responsibility for the war's outcome lay squarely with its architects. But the war's aftermath also bloodied the hands of critics who insisted on walking away without condition and regardless of consequence.
[A]sk any American officer there and he will tell you that, absent U.S. forces, Iraq's ditches will fill rapidly as the death toll multiplies tenfold. The United States owes Iraq many things. Being an engine of murder isn't one of them.
Surely the Nancy Pelosis, John Murthas, Carl Levins and Harry Reids of the world are aware of the calamity that a withdrawal could unleash on the people of Iraq. Their insistence that we nonetheless get out suggests that they simply don't care.
