Thursday, November 20, 2008

Too Much Inertia to Lose

Right after Barack Obama won the election, I wrote that war supporters shouldn't panic. I wrote that things wouldn't be as bad as we feared:

I think we've gone far enough toward winning that it would take a stupendous feat of idiocy to undo what we've accomplished. I don't put it beyond some of the loyal former opposition, but I doubt it.


Mind you, if we still saw violence in Iraq at July 2007 levels, I'd have panicked, too. But we are clearly winning and we are clearly on a glide path out of routine combat and out of Iraq completely. President Obama will have little reason to interfere with a path set by a Republican president. Doing so will only raise the risk of being blamed for a defeat if Iraq should falter and our enemies regroup enough to sustain a counter-attack.

And if you still don't sleep a little better at night, consider the reaction of the pro-defeat crowd that pinned their hopes on Obama leading the headlong flight from Iraq as they ponder Obama's apparent security-related appointments:

Antiwar groups and other liberal activists are increasingly concerned at signs that Barack Obama's national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views on other important foreign policy issues.


The anti-war side won't fixate on Iraq too much in the new year, I'm sure. They still have a war in Afghanistan to lose. What? You really believe they won't turn on the "good war" too?