To which DH replied: Eh? How do you figure that? The subtext was that the invasion of Iraq was in no small part responsible for the U.S.'s weakened political position and the widespread antagonism towards us. Fixing that situation, insofar as it can be fixed at all, requires making nice with the rest of the world.
To which I responded: It does not follow from this ("the invasion of Iraq was in no small part responsible for the U.S.'s weakened political") that the remedy is either to get out of Iraq or to make nice. It could just as well follow from it that it is necessary for the u.s. to invade both Iran and Syria. Many high-positioned supporters of the Vietnam War doubted that it had been a good idea to begin with. Many now doubtless feel that however stupid the Iraq invasion was, fleeing would be even worse.
To which DH responded with an irrelevant wisecrack: Is the U.S. still in Vietnam? The stakes were so high, how could they have withdrawn?
Meanwhile, from Common Dreams we have this:
CommonDreams.org May 24, 2007
Progressive Democrats of America
PDA Angry with Failure of Democratic Leaders on Iraq
WASHINGTON
There are ways Congress can end the bloody, unwinnable occupation in Iraq, and ways not to. The approach of the Democratic leadership has utterly failed - as they now prepare to give President Bush $95 billion more war funding through a bill that no longer has any timelines for troop withdrawal.
http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/0524-01.htm
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The logic is bad in this statement. To say that X failed to achieve Q implies that it was X's _purpose_ to achieve Q. A couple points.
Everyone is in agreement that there would be immense _electoral_ benefits for the DP if their candidates would simply declare their intention, if elected, to bring the troops home. Yet, as a number of commentators have noticed, all the 'serious' candidates have been willing to risk defeat in the primaries in order to maintain "room" for maneuver if elected. Moreover, we should assume that those candidates do not really disagree with the general position expressed by the CFR.
The DP leadership and presidential candidates are not stupid, they are not weak, they are not cowardly. They are committed to an exit from Iraq "with dignity," which means no exist whatever until the survival of the troops there is in serious doubt.
It was this CFR thread that led me to begin reading lbo-talk debates from October 2001 and the summer of 2003. I take it that the purpose of political analysis is to contribute to strategy in building a mass movement, over the long run, to u.s. imperialism. That is why the debate in October 2001 over what the u.s. government "should do" was so absurd. The question was what left cadre working in the nascent anti-war movement should do. And that of course had to be based not on the facts of October 2001 but on the best possible anticipation of the facts of 2006 and 2008. And those facts were obvious even then (and predicted by Yoshie, myself, and others): The U.S. was in something worse than a quagmire. One can retreat from a quagmire. Hence my proposal of the tarbaby metaphor: The harder Brer Rabbit struggle to force the tarbaby to release him, the more he was stuck.
So our purpose was not the absurd purpose of influencing u.s. government policy at the moment. Only an idiot would assume that what leftists believed or said would make a difference in D.C. in 2001 or 2003 or 2005. Therefore only a political naif would argue about what the government _should do_ in response to 9/11.
On our knowledge, at least the knowledge some of us had, we had to begin to build up the morale of the tiny anti-war forces of 2001 and 2003, and we would do that by insisting that our task was to build the basis for a movement that would begin to swell only in a numbere of years in the future -- and that we had time to do that because the U.S. was not going to leave Afghanistan or Iraq, but it was going to have more and more difficulty in staying.
We still have that time. Our political thought now must be focused on building an anti-war movement that will only begin to make a difference in policy in 2010 or later. The U.S. will still be waging war in the mideast and central asia at that time.
Carrol