MoJo on the Military
Of all the places for sage advice, Mother Jones
First, the Weekly Standard tends to assume that we're going to need to keep troops in Iraq around for years before the country is stable. It's not a bad assumption, given that the insurgency can still strike at will even in heavily-guarded Shiite holy cities. Still, this decision mostly rests in the hands of Iraq's future government. The Shi'a are campaigning on a "USA must go" platform, and if they follow through on that promise, the Bush administration won't have much choice but to start drawing down troops?regardless of whether the insurgency has been licked or not. (And our intelligence agencies say it hasn't been.)The second point is that liberals?and Democrats especially?have said nary a word about the future of the military lately. John Kerry may have been the first to suggest expanding our active-duty forces, but no one's said anything since. So the Democrats not only have fed the perception that they make national security proposals only when they need to look "tough" on the campaign trail, but they've also absented themselves entirely from an important debate.
Amen ....