Leaving the Good Fight

The picture is one of the great Daumier prints, showing the proud lawyer exiting the court with his weeping client and her child.  The caption is “You have lost, but you have had the privilege of hearing me plead your case!”

I thought of that cartoon as I read the final TRB column in The New Republic by Peter Beinart -- author of “The Good Fight” (subtitle:  “Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again”).  Formerly a liberal hawk, he is baling out of the Iraq war.  The Iraqis didn’t meet his expectations, and we’re apparently just too decent a country to do what is necessary to win a war like this.   

So he’s parachuting to a soft landing for him, moving on to other good fights, having discovered (as Hillary Clinton is learning) that a public mea culpa on Iraq is the re-admission price to liberal politics these days.   

And good luck to the Iraqis!  They have lost, but they had the privilege of having Peter Beinart plead their case, until now. 

Compare that to Larry Miller’s must-read essay on the war in The Weekly Standard, entitled  “Hineni” (Hebrew for “Here I Stand”).  It starts out funny, turns biting, and ends eloquently:

So here's my stand, such as it is. I don't care about 2008 or 2012.  I don't care who's the frontrunner of either party, or who declares he's running, or who gets this money or that money, or who starts a committee. . . .    I will only care about one thing:  the next three months; the next three weeks, days, hours.  This new guy, Petraeus, seems to at least have some idea of what needs to be done . . .  so I'll support him and pray for him.

For no other reason than the possibility of fixing this and "winning" is clearly our obligation and, not incidentally, the right thing to do. . . .  Hineni.

Beinart’s last essay pretty much proves the real point his book made.  Larry Miller’s latest essay does as well.

Senator Joseph Lieberman writes on "The Choice in Iraq" in today's Wall Street Journal, arguing for a cease-fire in Washington until it becomes clear whether General Petraeus's strategy can work: "We are at a critical moment in Iraq -- at the beginning of a key battle, in the midst of a war that is irretrievably bound up in an even bigger, global struggle . . . ."

Comments

[soccerdad]

Charles Krauthammer deserves similar criticism. While he's not saying that the U.S. should pull out, lately he's been taking a pretty consistent line that the failure is an Iraqi one.