The Iraq Wall

Henry Scheerer over at Huffington Post has a blog entry calling for the imminent withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. To read him, the withdrawal is all but underway already.

In that spirit, I go out on the following limb: the Senate's oh-so-delicate walking away from full arm-link with the President on the war is just the beginning. Here's how this story ends: for purely political reasons, the US gets out far sooner than the true believers would like, far later than the anti-war folks would have wanted, and at a time determined (as was the onset of the war) by the political calendar....You can't be sure exactly when the alarm rings that signals end-of-toleration for the adventure, but we've clearly passed that point, and now all that's left is to manage the pullout as deftly (and, if you're the President, as much as you can to show we've "won") as possible.

I differ. I don't believe the forces that we have set in motion can be recalled by anyone now. This cataclysm has taken on a life of its own.

If Bush can't conduct the war, guess what? The ONI and the other secret offices in the Pentagon that run the country will find somebody else to fight it. We're there for the duration. If the country wants out, the war propaganda machine and the Department of Homeland Security will do whatever is necessary to convince us otherwise. We're going to see absurdly destructive, wasteful, unreasonable and inhumane behavior committed in the Middle East in our name. If we don't like it, it will be committed here, too.