Letter to Netter

Here's an email I received last night from a good friend who usually has the most biting of analyses:

I've gotta hand it to the Dems for doing the morally right thing by starting to put the heat on GWB for non-escalation. Frankly, as I think you know, I personally favor the cynical option: giving Junior whatever he wants so that he has the opportunity between now and 2008 to completely destroy the Republican Party as a vote-getting entity.

(BTW: by "right thing" I mean the right thing for American families -- beginning to end the shameful waste of American lives & the waste of taxpayer $$. Teddy's bill is clearly a prelude to a push for withdrawal, and leaving Iraq isn't necessarily the best thing for Iraqis; I think the minute we get out of there all hell's gonna break loose, and they'll be outright civil carnage until the situation there shakes out with clear winners and losers and a reformed sociopolitical strata. Once that shakeout happens, stability will return although the form of that stable society probably won't look very pretty from any vantage point other than that of the new ruling elite. Nonetheless, we're going to have to leave sooner or later, our presence is impeding the inevitable, so we might as get out & let the Iraqis start to get on with whatever they have to go through on their own to get to the other side.)

The Dems will benefit in the short term by doing the right thing, which also enables them to put Repubs in the bind of having to either repudiate GWB or repudiate the clear will of the electorate -- my guess is that when Teddy's bill come to a vote, almost every repub senator up for re-election in 2008 will cross the aisle.

However, the Dems have also got to know that they're setting themselves up for another generation of nonstop calumny and revisionism by the RW noise machine. If you listen closely you can almost hear the wingnuts smearing away right now w/ their crayons: "We were winning but the pansy liberals made us pull out." Get ready for it. Since you live and work w/ latte sippers you probably don't directly hear much of this but I've got to tell you, in my 25 yrs on wall street if I had a dime for every time I heard that we lost Vietnam because of spineless liberals or hippies or Jane Fonda I'd be retired already. The truly scary thing is that i hear this tiresome refrain from otherwise bright and sensible people.

It is w/ that knowledge that I've got to hand it to Teddy, Nancy & Harry -- they're doing the morally right thing even though they know they & their party will be vilified and traduced for the next 20 yrs because of it.

My thought was that this approach vis-a-vis the Iraqi's themselves is actually pretty libertarian. Hello, Hobbesian state, and call us when you come out the other side.

Back here in the states we call it, "tough love."