April 8, 2007 The Way We Live Now The Undeparted By NOAH FELDMAN
On the surface, recent votes in Congress appear to signal a new Democratic determination to withdraw from Iraq. But the reality is otherwise. It is not only that the resolutions were drafted and adopted with the certain knowledge that they would be vetoed. More important, even if a future Democratic president did try to implement the new plans, the results would likely end up looking oddly similar to the Bush administration’s current strategy. In politics as in war, things are seldom what they seem.S
If there’s one thing that Iraqis and Americans agree on, it’s that U.S. troops don’t belong in Iraq — and yet even now, the troops are still there. Elected officials of all persuasions are supposed to respond to public opinion. So what explains this gap? One possibility is that politicians realize that raw public sentiment cannot be translated into practical policy without taking account of the likely consequences. It is not enough to give the public what it wants today if tomorrow — or whenever the next elections are held — the public will be even angrier about where things have gone in the meantime. With office comes responsibility — if only because politicians want to keep their jobs.
As the only presidential candidate with previous White House experience who has a plausible shot in 2008, Hillary Clinton in particular may be thinking along these lines. It would be easier in the Democratic primaries and maybe even the general election for her to demand a rapid pullout — but what if she wins? It won’t do her much good to be president if she has to preside over a spiraling escalation of quasi-genocidal rage as American soldiers come home as promised; and if she were to break a campaign promise to withdraw troops, it would hardly bode well for a second term.
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Will the public, in the U.S. or Iraq, accept a continued American presence under these terms? Now that we have rediscovered that fighting with inadequate resources loses wars, the public is understandably fed up with the whole undertaking. The larger war on terror, though, is a war that most of us still believe we need to fight. To do so, we need to avoid the kind of withdrawal that would allow Al Qaeda to claim victory while simultaneously precipitating a humanitarian crisis that would destabilize the region. We have no business starting wars we cannot bring ourselves to complete, but maybe we can bring ourselves to win a war we didn’t start.
Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at New York University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.