SPENCER: MAKING SENSE. I quite agree with Spencer's argument that Iraq remains a minefield even for anti-war Dems. That the public supports withdrawal now doesn't mean that they'll support it in five or ten years time. I think that support for withdrawal is genuine, and likely larger than the polling has captured, if only because there remains a core group of Republican partisans who can't bring themselves to publicly renounce the war, regardless of how they feel privately. But as Spencer has pointed out, that support can vanish in hindsight. It wasn't just Norm Podhoretz who, over time, became re-illusioned with the Vietnam War. Millions of moderate to conservative Americans who had come to support a withdrawal from Vietnam by 1972 found it very easy to convince themselves, by 1980, that the war had been a noble struggle undermined by the malfeasance of counter-culture activists and Congressional Democrats. On the other hand, the Iraq situation is different. Democrats, even hawkish ones, haven't been implicated in the disaster to the extent that they were in 1968. The insistence of the Republican Party on monopolizing the political and rhetorical space around Iraq has left them uniquely vulnerable. There are two critical opportunities available to the Democratic Party right now. The first is to end the dominance of the Republican Party on national security issues, and the second is to redefine national security competence around a value other than "toughness." I think that both of these can be achieved, and that the second in particular will have long term policy payoffs. Nevertheless, the game still has to be played, because, as Spencer notes, they're already pointing to the imaginary knives in their backs.
--Robert Farley
