The White House may as well send engraved invitations to insurgents: U.S. troops leaving Iraq, midnight, December 31, 2005. Murder and mayhem to follow. Limited seating for beheadings. Reservations recommended.
Even without a deadline, the Senate resolution demonstrates poor timing and another victory for politics over principle. In less than a month, Iraqis are scheduled to vote for their first government under their new constitution. And we pick this moment to convey a weakening commitment?
But then, we always do, as our enemies have noted in their own planning for postwar Iraq. As we learned last month, Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (both are senior al Qaeda leaders) that the lessons of Vietnam offered a road map for their own strategies:
"Things may develop faster than we imagine," he wrote. "The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam - and how they ran and left their agents - is noteworthy. Because of that, we must be ready starting now. ."
The balance of the letter, dated July 2005, focused on how to impose Islamic authority in Iraq and extend jihad to secular nations surrounding Iraq, leading to a clash with Israel. For people who plot time by centuries, waiting out America's tolerance for war is a cinch.
You don't have to be a Middle East expert, or a neo-con, to connect those dots. It's human nature. Like fear, the weak will carries a scent; and those who seek our destruction have a nose for it.
We may well regret stirring this nest, though it was probably inevitable. And those who opposed the war from the beginning, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, can enjoy what most other Democrats and many Republicans cannot: intellectual consistency.
But even those who can claim to have known better then have a moral duty now to act in the best interest of this country. For better or worse, our future appears to be tied irrevocably to that of Iraq.