From Leon Wieseltier:
Does all this pessimism warrant withdrawal? I will confess that I wish it did. Since I was a supporter of the war, I have its consequences also on my own conscience. I do not believe that American troops should die for some heartless Kissingerian notion of American credibility in the world, or the like. (Anyway, it is the war itself that is doing the most damage to American credibility. After terrorism, the most immediate problem for American foreign policy in the age of Bush is anti-Americanism.) Even if we withdraw from Iraq, we will be a spectacularly powerful country whose enemies should still beware. And moral reasoning about such matters should be efficient: in the lag between the conclusion that we should withdraw, if that is what we conclude, and our withdrawal, Americans will pointlessly perish.
For all these reasons, I am not inclined to dismiss all the antiwar voices in Congress and elsewhere as a depraved isolationism or another Peter, Paul, and Mary concert. This war has not been a glittering success, and its costs have been considerable. And I have never felt comfortable with the America in whose name this administration has conducted this war: in times of danger one tries to overlook differences about other issues and other challenges, but I do not agree that only a state preemptive of civil rights, treaty obligations, and international alliances – that only the preemptive state – can adequately defend itself.
Leon does not believe we should therefore up and leave. The rest is here.
(Photo: Yuri Kozyrev for Time.)
The Dish 