The unexamined price of quitting

Given that most Democrats yearn to walk away from Iraq, and that the general public wants the next president to be a Democrat, we have to wonder how President Clinton or President Obama would handle the exit, and how quickly she or he would bail out. It's truly remarkable how little attention the punditocracy gives to this issue.

David Horowitz of Duke University is the exception. In today's Wall Street Journal, he weighs the alternatives and concludes: 'It is of course still possible to argue that withdrawal is preferable to an open-ended involvement, on the grounds that the high costs to us of involvement exceed the high costs of withdrawal. But the opposite position--which happens to be mine--is also tenable: The consequences of withdrawal are worse than the costs of continuing involvement.' And this, regardless of whether or not one believes (which happens to be my position) that invading Iraq in the first place was a mistake. Horowitz's essay is online at OpinionJournal.