It pains me to say that — my parents were involved with the founding of the party. My dad bound up the party’s first petitions to go to Albany. I “cut my teeth” in Young Americans for Freedom. But the party seems to have lost its vision somewhere along the line.

McCain is pro-amnesty. he told suporters he wouldn’t appoint any more judges like Alito. He has bought into the global warming hoax. He led a full frontal assault on the First Amendment. He has gotten money from Soros. He has voted for Federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for embryonic stem cell research. He voted against the tax cuts twice. He just got through pandering to La Raza, an Hispanic separatist organization. On every issue of significance, he has gone out of his way to poke conservatives in the eye. So how can the “Conservative Party” endorse him?

The Conservative Party would get more votes with a real conservtive on the line. But it only seems to care about patronage—and not getting blamed.

It’s sad when those are your primary considerations.

“This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it—it’s—it—it probably is…. [Saddam] has been defying the world for twelve years. It is very clear—I mean, I—I—I haven’t found anybody who doesn’t believe that he’s hiding stuff there. And if there’s going to be a civilized world order, the—the world has to be able to act on its—you know, on—on—on its agreements. And—and there have been now seventeen UN resolutions calling on this guy to disarm, a—something that he agreed to do, and at certain—at a certain point, you have to enforce it.
Now you can quibble with the fact, you can argue with the fact that the Bush administration forced this judgment at this time in this way, but I think—and—but I—but I do believe that it was Bill Clinton’s moral responsibility and responsibility as leader of the country to do it in 1998, as we—as we were saying before. And—and I think that now that we’ve reached this point, where the inspectors are in and it has become absolutely manifestly clear that he’s not going to abide by this—you know, just look at his behavior in the days since the peace protests. All of a sudden, you know, he’s—he’s—you know, he’s defiant again. So I think that, you know, the—the message has to be sent because if it isn’t sent now, if we don’t do this now, it empowers every would-be Saddam out there and every would-be terrorist out there.”

The reality here is that the troops are likely to come home with all deliberate speed, but that the exact timetable will depend on the sort of boring how-do-we-move-that-truck, and what’s-the-rotation-schedule logistics that exist well beyond the realm of actual strategic policy. People in the military familiar with the process tell me that we should be down to about 30,000 troops in four years. But these are details of implementation. The real importance of Obama’s op-ed is his insistence that we need to leave-that we can’t have the 100-year bases that John McCain has proposed-and that we need to refocus our attention on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And that’s where the real foreign policy debate should be, not the silly diversion over whether Obama is “changing” his position.

Also today, we have Noemie Emery rehearsing the neocon take on the war in the Weekly Standard, a half-throated argument that the left just can’t seem to accept success in Iraq, including the obligatory glancing criticism of me. If you define success as the absence of violence in Iraq, I’ll be thrilled to call it a success. But we’ve got a ways to go, including the reconciliation of the Sunni Awakening forces with the Malaki government, before you can count on that. You also have the likely reality of an Iraqi Shi’ite regime that is closer to Iran than it is to us, and an Iraqi military that has the Badr Corps, which was birthed by the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard Corps, as its backbone. I’m not sure I’d call that success, but we’ll see.

Meanwhile, the larger point still holds: the Iraq war was a strategic disaster, part of a deeply stupid regional policy promulgated by the Bush Administration. Why? Because it caused us to lose focus on the real problem, Al Qaeda, the people who attacked us on 9/11, and their handmaidens, the Taliban. This sort of attack, reported in the Times today, suggests a well-organized and entrenched enemy. Obama’s right about the need for more combat brigades in Afghanistan…but we also need a return of the U.S. special ops forces who were working the Afghpak border areas and were pulled out to prosecute the war in Iraq. It was the foolish neocon plan to remake the middle east that made soldiering in Afghanistan so dangerous for the nine troops killed today. Noemie Emery should try to explain the grandeur of the Bush foreign policy vision to the families of those soldiers.