In Search of the Clear, Simple, and Wrong

This must be the most interesting, most heartening, and least reported poll result of the week, if not the year:

While a bare majority of 51 percent called the Democrats’ victory “a good thing,” even more said they were concerned about some of the actions a Democratic Congress might take, including 78 percent who were somewhat or very concerned that it would seek too hasty a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Another 69 percent said they were concerned that the new Congress would keep the administration “from doing what is necessary to combat terrorism,” and two-thirds said they were concerned it would spend too much time investigating the administration and Republican scandals.

The other news in this poll — naturally, the part that got into the headline — was that Bush’s approval rating is now 31%, down from 35% in Reuters surveys the week before. I take two points from that. First, I’m suspicious of Reuters’s sampling; pre-election polls I’d seen were more in the range of 40-44%, but it’s no picnic for this president either way. As for the trend, I’ll go out on a short limb here to say that the drop mainly reflects conservative apprehension that the White House is looking for a formula to bail out of Iraq before standing up that nation’s army and police force. If that’s where Robert Gates and the Baker Commission are leading us, then count me among those who no longer support this President.

No matter how crappy things seem in Iraq, the gravest error would be to lose sight of just how quickly the wrong policy could make things infinitely worse. There is no running from al-Qaeda, and there is no easy formula for restoring peace to Iraq. A withdrawal would magnify the very problems that tempt us to run, since those problems would immediately reappear in Afghanistan, badder than ever. Particularly in the Middle East, the perception of weakness attracts hungry jackals, and the jackals think we’re limping away. If establishing a reasonably secure Iraq in which terror can’t thrive means putting in more U.S. troops until more Iraqi troops are available to replace them, then so be it. Priority one must be to hasten the training and equipping of those Iraqi forces and police without diminishing the quality of the training or the vetting of the recruits. That will take more than one year and less than five, and the Iraqis will probably need us for air support for some time thereafter. But to set hard deadlines that are divorced of combat realities would lead only to the next retreat, and would inviting more attacks from more havens of terror.

The question that continues to interest me the most is just what policy, if any, the Democrats will end up agreeing on. That debate is already manifesting itself in discussions over who will lead the Democratic majority in the House. Nancy Pelosi supports John Murtha for the job, but Murtha’s wacky ideas, including an immediate “redeployment” from Iraq to Okinawa (!) are objectively indefensibe, even laughable:

Mr. Murtha’s candidacy is troubling for several reasons, beginning with his position on the war in Iraq. A former Marine, Mr. Murtha deserves credit for sounding an alarm about the deteriorating situation a year ago. But his descriptions of the stakes there have been consistently unrealistic, and his solutions irresponsible. Just last week he denied that the United States was fighting terrorism in Iraq, though al-Qaeda is known to play a major part in the insurgency. He said the United States should abandon even the effort to train the Iraqi army and should “redeploy as soon as practicable,” an extreme step that most congressional Democrats oppose. He claimed that “stability in the Middle East, stability in Iraq,” would come from such an abrupt withdrawal; in fact, virtually all Iraqi and Middle Eastern leaders have said that it would lead to a greatly escalated conflict that could spread through the region.

If you guessed that these words came from the editors of the Wall Street Journal or National Review, . The revanchist calls for immediate withdrawal are starting to get the close reconsideration for which I’d so hoped before this election. If the resulting consensus chooses unpalatable options over far worse ones, then we’ll be a better country for it, and al-Qaeda’s celebrations will prove to be premature.