Brooks or Webb?

A reader writes:

In your post, "Between Failure & Horror," you referred to David Brooks' Thursday column. While he may be right about a soft partition, Brooks drives me absolutely bonkers, and this paragraph is exactly why:

"The Democratic approach, as articulated by Senator Jim Webb - simply get out of Iraq "in short order" - is a howl of pain that takes no note of the long-term political and humanitarian consequences. Does the party that still talks piously about ending bloodshed in Darfur really want to walk away from a genocide the U.S. is partly responsible for? Are U.S. troops going to be pulled back to secure bases to watch passively while rivers of Iraqi blood lap at their gates? How many decades will Americans be fighting to quell the cycle of regional violence set loose by a transnational Sunni-Shiite explosion?"

Webb understands what Brooks has refused to since the get-go - this administration isn't serious about its responsibilities in Iraq, and nothing points this out more clearly than Plus Up, Tastes Great, Less Filling - whatever the hell we're calling this thing.  I think this has far less to do with Webb failing to understand long-term political and humanitarian consequences, and much more to do with his painful understanding that what's happening now isn't a serious effort to win, or even establish a peace, but a crass effort to smear some of this on the next administration, no matter which unlucky bastards comprise it.

If we leave before he's out of office, the whole of this sorry affair is his.  He has no one to blame for his failures. If somebody else comes in and, miracle of miracles, pulls something off, Bush will act as if he loosened the jar that somebody else finally opened. If the next (probably Democratic) administration pulls out, Bush will have succeeded in wiping his sticky booger on them, and his water carriers will take delight in trying to spread the meme that Democrats lost the war.

The bloodletting has been going on for a couple of years now. Not only have we not been able to do anything about it thus far, but the president's plan offers no reasonable hope that we'll do anything to stem it. And, at the risk of expressing a purely selfish interest, how many American lives is he prepared to throw at this?  Brooks asks "How many decades will Americans be fighting to quell the cycle of regional violence...?" Here's a question for him: how many decades does he expect us to stay there, with no sign of the existing violence abating?

I, too, find the possibility of a soft partition worth investigating, but I remember being chastened when I heard Walter Russell Mead's comment about it - sure, we've had so much fun trying to establish one government; imagine how much three will be. It gives a person pause.

(Photo: Dennis Cook/AP.)