There are two main strains of thinking about Iraq right now within the Democratic Party, and both are destined to make us fail in any coming elections. Both play into the hands of the Bush and Republican machines, and both contain the seeds of defeat.
On the one hand, we have many eloquent voices arguing that we have to leave Iraq immediately. They rightly argue that further U.S. occupation of that country will polarize Iraqis, giving them a single, foreign enemy to focus on. They also argue that continuing American involvement will inevitably lead to continuing American deaths.
On the other, we have the appeasement wing of the Party, led, most notoriously, by Sen. Joseph Lieberman. This group argues, also correctly, that any immediate withdrawal by U.S. troops will leave a power vacuum, that Iraq could easily slide one way or the other, into a Balkanized civil war or into a unified, Shi'ite-dominated Islamic republic.
Both sides pander to the dearest wishes of Republican strategists. The unilateral withdrawers feed into the perception, born in the years after our defeat in Vietnam and nurtured through the dark decades of Reagan and Bush (I), that somehow Democrats were responsible for our losing that unwinnable war. That alone would not be enough, however, for this to have any real traction. The fact is that those of us who wish us to withdraw tomorrow leave a very real problem:
they do not have a solution to the fact that Iraq needs some sort of stabilizing force if it is ever to become a rational state. Thanks to the Bush failures, we cannot just leave Iraq without having serious consequences for the stability of the region. Something else is needed. Most crucially, the "get out now" line sounds like failure. This is political death.
On the other hand, the appeasement wing of the Democratic Party has ceded to the Republicans any initiative in foreign affairs by saying that we have to stand with the president, that we have to continue supporting his insanely destructive and willfully ignorant policies. They, too, point to inevitable defeat for the Democrats: if the Republicans are right, voters will say, why vote for Democrats?
The administration has laid the seeds of its own electoral success. At this point, the sole point of majority approval the Bush Administration still has is on the topic of national security. Although you and I know that Iraq had nothing to do with our national security in the months and years after September 11th, 2001, it does so now. Our stupidity in Iraq has made it a breeding ground for a whole new generation of angry young men. It wasn't a threat, but now it is. It will be even more of a threat after a unilateral withdrawal. That threat will feed the irrational desire for security through a successor Republican administration: do you remember the last election? Do you remember the issues that (however stupidly) pushed Bush up just enough?
So what is the solution?
The first thing we have to realize is that the leaders of our party have been as thoroughly brainwashed as any typical American when it comes to the question of the United Nations. The single most successful act of this otherwise extraordinarily unsuccessful administration has been to destroy American faith in the U.N. Our leaders no longer speak of the need for the involvement of the international community in Iraq. An entire history - a fantastically successful history - of international involvement, so carefully built and nurtured during the years of the Cold War, has been callously and ignorantly destroyed by this administration. We are as guilty as any in allowing that to happen.
The fact is that the only solution to Iraq we as Democrats have to push, and push hard, is a re-involvement of the international community in that mess. This is the only rational solution. This is an effort we must make if we are to return to any form of sanity after these last five insane years under President Bush. We have to change our rhetoric on Iraq, and we have to do it immediately: although most American troops should withdraw, we have a solution: a United Nations-sponsored, truly multinational force.
