CrossroadsMaimon Schwarzschild

Jules Crittenden puts it starkly:

We’ve arrived at a crossroads in history.  The choices are simple.   

Ina letter to President Bush Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi andSenate President Harry Reid said they want out of Iraq. It’s over. TheAmerican people are sick of it. There is no reason and no will to keepfighting this.

At the American Enterprise Institute the sameday, senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman came out for a big,sustained surge of troops into Iraq. They made the case for fighting.Key word: “Winnable.” They outlined the consequences of acceptingdefeat. Key word: “Catastrophic.”

We are sharply divided as a nation. There will be no governing byconsensus. Only by hardnosed leadership. This week, we’ll find out whatit is going to be. Neither of our options is attractive. But that’s war.

OptionOne: Pull out. Achieve short-term gratification for those who believeour absence from Iraq will solve our problems. Watch Iraq descend intofurther violence. Watch a nuclear-armed Iran come to dominate Iraq andthe world’s richest oil fields.

No longer a world power, discredited by our own choice, we can watch the pile of bodies mount…  [W]e’ll just wait to see who emerges as the new world power. It will be awhile before there is one, and much longer before there is one we wouldcare to live under. I predict a dark age, in which brutal second-ratepowers such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea do what they chooseto whom they choose without restraint. An age of modern warlords, withno over-arching, feared power to keep them in check. We can watch thesick man that is Europe slowly succumb. We can watch small free nationstry to fend for themselves. We can await the inevitable nuclear crisis.

Does that sound at all medieval or apocalyptic?  It is. Don’t think we can’t go back to that.

Doesit sound overly melodramatic and alarmist? If so, you’re a fool with nounderstanding of history. I have bad news for you. The fight againstevil in this world is business as usual. It never ends.

We’vefaced this kind of choice before. We have not always chosen well. Youknow people who lived through such a time, when the failure to actagainst evil early led to more horrific bloodshed later. You may haverelatives who died because of that. I do. In our lifetimes, we’ve neverbeen more than a few inches from the abyss, however comfortable andsafe our lives seem today. If you’re an adult, then you’ve livedthrough a time when the evil of communism was held at bay. But onlyjust, and millions died. Millions remain enslaved.

Read the whole thing.

I don’t know whether a “surge” is the right answer militarily.  But I do know that much of the Democratic Party leadership, much of its followership, and still more of its media alter egos yearn for  “Bush”, by which they mean the US, to be defeated in Iraq.  Perhaps we already are defeated: by conditions in Iraq, by coalition mistakes – there are always mistakes in war -, and by the relentless drumbeat of defeatism at home.  But if we are, I think Crittenden is right that it won’t be good news for Iraq, for the United States, or for any sort of civilised prospects in the world.