Go Team!

I didn't mean to leave you speechless, Dave. Well, good thing we have 15 months to go before we give these ideas to the next Democratic President. :)

While it's a pretty safe assumption that Dems will be less aggressive and strategic in responding to spurious claims than the right, I think that Drum is off-base here. Dems still have a winning hand on the Iraq issue. It's was a war of choice, George Bush's choice, it's going badly, 70%+ of Americans want it to end and for us to bring our troops home. Bush and the GOP have been dead wrong on every aspect of the war, from choosing to fight it to how they fought it to telling the American people for 4 years that it was going great. Bush is desperately grasping at anything he can to rebuild some support for the war, but Vietnam is a distraction. We should keep focus directly on this war, which is a disaster for everyone and is Bush's fault. (And I like your line. That kind of dismissal of this attempted sideshow is perfect.)

The problem we all have is that Colin Powell was right, and, to some extent, Bush was right. We broke it, we bought it. Maybe 2-3 years ago it was accurate to say that much of the violence in Iraq was spurred by the American presence, and therefore our departure may have been an improvement for Iraq. But now, with a full fledged, low-level civil war underway, it seems hard to argue that the Americans are not a stabilizing force in the country and that, at least in the short term, you'd see an upswing in violence were we to leave.

This is a very tough one. There's a reason why the objective function of the Baker-Hamilton report seemed to be an outcome that would have broad bi-partisan support among the U.S. public and preserve some of our dignity rather than one which would be the best for the Iraqi people.

Worst. Foreign. Policy. Debacle. Ever.