In an excellent diary that was on the rec list until recently, David Sirota asks When Will the Innocent Bystander Fable Stop ? It's a good question, and David provides a great analysis for why the Fable is BS. But in doing so he promotes another fable: that the Dems are spineless, poll-watching cowards beholden to the DLC consultant class. This, I submit, is bunk, pure and simple. Let's explore why below.
Democrats are not, as David (and many others) states, "afraid to lead," nor are they simply following the advice of their timid consultants to avoid taking "extreme" positions on Iraq for fear of displeasing the "voters." The voters want out of this war, that is crystal clear, and the Dems have the "courage" to ignore them and resist public sentiment. So they are perfectly willing to swim against the tide of public opinion when they feel it appropriate. So to find an explanation for why the Dems are not aggressively trying to put an end to the war, and promote that policy to the public, I think we have to back up a step and try to figure out if there is another constituency that they do, in fact, "fear" and are trying to serve.
I think it should be glaringly obvious to someone like David and other progressives, who generally understand how the world works and where real power lies, that the business elite in this country -- that segment of it that concerns itself with the overall management of the global economic system, in any event -- is absolutely against "liquidating" the Iraq War through a complete withdrawal. They may not like the war, and they may wish Bush had never gotten them into this mess, but they will in no way at this point permit a US withdrawal that creates space for a complete Shiite take-over in Iraq and an eventual Shiite Iraq-Iran alliance in the heart of the world's oil supply.
It was not for no reason that Saudi Arabia summoned President Cheney to Riyadh last Thanksgiving to tell him the US would not be withdrawing from Iraq, thank you very much. Given the fact that most of Saudi oil lies under Saudi Shiite territory adjacent to Iraq, it is not difficult to understand why. You can bet Cheney is not the only person who has heard this message from the Saudis and understands the implications of a Shiite victory for the current, very profitable (for elites, at least) economic order.
This is precisely why no major Dem presidential candidate can talk about "ending" the Iraq war without adding a codicil about keeping a "residual" force inside, or adjacent to, Iraq for "contingencies." For public consumption, those "contingencies" are usually described as genocide and ethnic cleansing. The unspoken one -- the one that really matters -- is a radical Shiite regime in Iraq taking over and aligning with the Iranian mullahs. No US president who makes it through our flawed and money-dominated electoral system -- whether R or D -- will ever (be allowed to) permit that.
So the Dems -- the leadership that understands the real world, in any event -- are perfectly happy to feign impotence, despite a Congressional majority, to end the war.
I have to admit, it is a clever stance, given the undeniable public sentiment against the war, which they honor with rhetorical sound and fury, and the insistence of the elite that the war continue until the US has eliminated the possibility of the Shiite scenario, which they honor with inaction and feigned powerlessness.
So unless the public drastically changes the equation of pressures, incentives and disincentives, there will be no end soon to this criminal and bloody war. We are, as I like to say, at a Vietnam moment -- where Nixon, fearing for his ability to control civil disturbance at home, began withdrawing troops. If Americans don't make the Beltway crowd fear that public disaffection will spin out of their control -- through non-violent, but highly disruptive, civil disobedience and resistance -- it's simply useless to urge Dems to "grow a spine." They actually have one, and they're using it against us.