What is at stake

From The Washington Post:

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."

IF Iraq is a failure then the blame, as Charles Krauthammer recently pointed out, belongs to the Iraqis themselves. If democracy in Iraq fails it will be because the Iraqi people could not rise above their sectarian or tribal allegiances and form a national identity.

The arrogance of the American mindset often dances on the borderline between the comic and the tragic. The cycles of solar activity lead to a small increase in temperature on earth and it must be because we drive Explorers. The lack of sunlight over the South Pole during winter leads to a thinning of the ozone layer (which is formed by ultraviolet light from the sun) and it must be because we use too much hairspray. The freely elected Iraqi government will not do what must be done to bring order to the nation and it must be because the US Did or didn't (insert your favorite Iraq War criticism).

I'm not saying that there isn't more that the US could do. There has to be some way we could get Turkey to sign off on partitioning Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish zones. We could also tell the al-Maliki government that we are going to bring in a great many more troops and take whatever actions we deem necessary to disarm the militias and arrest their leaders and that if he doesn't sign off on it that he will find himself twisting in the breeze without any American support whatsoever.

Of course everything depends on what the new congress decides to do. If they are going to cut and run then the sooner the better. There is no point in sticking around for another six months and taking another six months worth of casualties while we search for a public relations formula that will allow us to "declare victory and leave", only to see the nation dissolve into civil war.

If the Democrats are determined to leave before some kind of stability has been brought to Iraq then we should just get out and let whatever is going to happen happen.

If we choose to do that, however, we should do it in the full knowledge of what the likely outcome will be. What we will wind up with, after a great deal of bloodshed and $90.00 per barrel oil, is a militant Shiite government in Baghdad which will be closely aligned with Tehran.

Together this Shiite axis of evil will control the largest and best equipped military in the Muslim world (and the largest and most powerful in the Middle East except for Israel) and will soon be nuclear armed. They will also control around half of the world's proven oil reserves and some petroleum geologists believe that Iraq possesses greater reserves than Saudi Arabia, but they have not yet been proven.

The first result of this alignment (other than $110.00 per barrel oil) would be to bring Europe openly into alliance with the radical Islamofascists. The next result would be to bring China, whose appetite for oil is only going to grow, more fully into partnership with the Islamic world. With both Western European technology and Chinese manufacturing capacity feeding the Jihadist war machine a radical change in the world's balance of power will leave the United States much more isolated and threatened than it currently is.

To avoid this outcome is worth spending a great deal of both blood and treasure, however it will require the new Democrat leadership to be willing to bitterly disappoint the George Soros/dailykos lunatic fringe of their party and continue slogging ahead in Iraq, because right now that is the key to everything.