Thanks Bob

Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey has written an op-ed that takes "American liberals" to task for their position on Iraq. In an effort to reach out to these liberals and really change their minds--as opposed to simply competing with Joe Lieberman for the title of every conservative's favorite Democrat--Kerrey chose to publish his piece in the notoriously liberal Wall Street Journal editorial page [heavy sarcasm].

He writes:

With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. American lawmakers who are watching public opinion tell them to move away from Iraq as quickly as possible should remember this: Concessions will not work with either al Qaeda or other foreign fighters who will not rest until they have killed or driven into exile the last remaining Iraqi who favors democracy.

The key question for Congress is whether or not Iraq has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11. The answer is emphatically "yes."

This does not mean that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11; he was not. Nor does it mean that the war to overthrow him was justified--though I believe it was. It only means that a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq would hand Osama bin Laden a substantial psychological victory.

Ah yes, the 'we should stay in Iraq forever so that Osama bin Laden doesn't claim victory' argument. Never mind that invading Iraq in the first place--which Kerrey aggressively advocated and still defends--was undoubtedly the best thing that has ever happened to Osama bin Laden. And never mind that bin Laden seems to be pretty content with the status quo--in which our armed forces are bogged down and strained to the breaking point by endless deployments in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

This is, quite simply, the dumbest possible argument for staying in Iraq. Bin Laden will declare victory no matter what we do. Allowing his taunts to dictate our policy is ludicrous. Plus, as I've noted before, there is little reason to think al Qaeda has a future in Iraq after we leave.

The remainder of Kerrey's piece focuses on the humanitarian arguments against leaving Iraq:

The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart.

Suppose we had not invaded Iraq and Hussein had been overthrown by Shiite and Kurdish insurgents. Suppose al Qaeda then undermined their new democracy and inflamed sectarian tensions to the same level of violence we are seeing today. Wouldn't you expect the same people who are urging a unilateral and immediate withdrawal to be urging military intervention to end this carnage? I would.

As an initial matter, it's probably worth pointing out that this hypothetical is laughably implausible. Are we really supposed to believe that there is some possible universe in which Shiite and Kurdish insurgents would have overthrown Saddam Hussein and established some kind of joint democratic government? Yeah right.

More importantly, though, and this is relevant to Kerrey's other argument as well, al Qaeda isn't some sort of roving anti-democracy force that targets any and all democratic governments. Al Qaeda is in Iraq right now because we are there. They are trying to undermine the Iraqi government because we are trying to prop it up. It's that simple. If the Kurds and Shiites had somehow managed to take over Iraq on their own, their main problem would be their Sunni countrymen, not al Qaeda. Al Qaeda wouldn't care. They'd have no dog in that fight.

A more realistic hypothetical would be Saddam dying and his government collapsing, thereby creating a power vacuum and leading to sectarian war. If that had happened, there would indeed be a liberal argument (though not necessarily a winning one) for intervening on humanitarian grounds. But there is an enormous difference between that hypothetical situation and the one we find ourselves in now. If you intervene for humanitarian reasons to stop a conflict that you had no role in starting, you enter on very different footing than if you invade a country without provocation and on false pretenses. In the former situation, you have a least a fighting chance of being perceived as well-intentioned and welcomed. In the latter, you are viewed as an occupier and blamed for all the ensuing chaos. These differences greatly affect what you can realistically hope to accomplish.

Put simply, there is no reason to believe that our continued presence in Iraq will in any way change the underlying dynamics of the region. The best we can hope for is to delay the inevitable. That's why the humanitarian argument fails. You can't have a humanitarian obligation to prevent something that is not preventable.

Not surprisingly, Kerrey's op-ed has been widely cited by right-wing blogs and pundits. Rush Limbaugh read virtually the entire op-ed on air (though not all of it--I'll return to that in a second). What I find especially annoying about this effusive right-wing praise for Kerrey's argument is how utterly disingenuous it is. The fact is that people like Rush Limbaugh don't care about humanitarian arguments or about the Iraqi people. One minute they're making fun of the torture at Abu Ghraib or claiming that we need to "take the gloves off" and stop being so worried about collateral civilian deaths; the next minute they're so very concerned about the humanitarian fallout if we leave. These are people who routinely dehumanize Iraqis, who call for a "more rubble, less trouble" approach to the war, and yet we're supposed to believe that they find Kerrey's humanitarian arguments so incredibly persuasive. We all know that none of these people, especially Limbaugh, would ever in a million years support intervening militarily in another country for purely humanitarian reasons. They never have and they never will. So this entire argument is little more than a cynical attempt to play 'gotcha' with liberals. People like Limbaugh pretend to share Kerrey's views, but they don't.

And that brings me to the final and most obnoxious part of Kerrey's op-ed. After spending the entire piece criticizing "liberals" for their irresponsible views, he ends with this paragraph:

Finally, Jim Webb said something during his campaign for the Senate that should be emblazoned on the desks of all 535 members of Congress: You do not have to occupy a country in order to fight the terrorists who are inside it. Upon that truth I believe it is possible to build what doesn't exist today in Washington: a bipartisan strategy to deal with the long-term threat of terrorism.

In other words, Kerrey supports withdrawal from Iraq as long as we leave some small residual force to help combat al Qaeda. If this plan sounds familiar, it's because it's essentially the plan endorsed by all major Democrats, including people like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. In typical Kerrey fashion, though, he wants us to believe that this is his own sensible moderate idea, not the irresponsible and weak position endorsed by "liberals."

So can you guess now which paragraph Rush Limbaugh failed to read on air? Yep, the one where Kerrey essentially endorses the prevailing Democratic position. Of course that didn't stop Limbaugh from noting that "Bob Kerrey is right on Iraq" and that his piece "may be one of the best summations of where we are that I've read in a long time."