This is the foreign policy equivalent of the hope that an economic depression will revive the Left.
And since the Gulf War, the Left has mounted the drumroll of imminent bodybags, only to find that the military has learned the lessons of Vietnam far better than the Left, and has actually changed its tactics, both in military decisions and domestic propaganda, again quite in contrast to the left that is still fighting the last war with the same rhetoric and the same tactics.
"No Blood for Oil" we chanted in 1991 carrying bodybags to warn of "tens of thousands" of deaths of American soliders; it didn't happen and the Left lost credibility on its doomsday predictions. Kosovo could not be helped and air power could not win the war, yet it did. And Afghanistan was far more successful than even the hawks in the US military thought it would be.
The military will only fight in Iraq using Iraqi bodies, on both sides of the conflict, with US air power assisting our chosen proxies. Right now, the defense department is in a search for the proper proxies, deciding which odd mix of Kurds, Shiites and defecting Hussein supporters can be melded into a force to overthrown Hussein's regime. The problem is that Kurdish participation enrages Turkey and Shiite participation threatens to expand Iran's influence, so unlike the rather irrelevant Northern Alliance forces we supported in Afghanistan, who we support in Iraq has major geopolitical consequences. So an Iraqi invasion is far more likely to stumble based on those political alliance problems than domestic protests.
The best strategy to prevent Iraqi invasions is to focus on the cause of the Palestinians, since that is already emeshing the Bush administration in the politics of the region which will restrain intervention in Iraq. If invading Iraq threatens to cause war over Israel, a lot of support both globally and in the US will evaporate.
-- Nathan Newman