The same political party who fails to make it clear that "this is the enemy", insists that you buy the Islamists propaganda starting points... James Joyner at Outside the Beltway posts: Prominent Iraq War Critics: Stay the Course...

Democrats will deliver the best of both worlds: less emphasis on military force and a rigid maintenance of U.S. foreign policies that are hated with passion and near-unanimity by 1.3 billion Muslims

I read his book and as I recall, his position is that the US needs to stop supporting Israel and corrrupt Arab regimes (and importing their oil)-- OR launch a massive "fire-bombing of Japan" war of total domination. There is no middle ground, so here he is complaining that Dems would probably make a bad situation, really bad by "rigid maintenance of U.S. foreign policies".

At this point the consensus view of policy experts seems to be that the US is in a "lose-lose" position in Iraq. There's no way forward; no way out. In addition, we know that the war was unnecessary. Iraq had no WMD and no "operational relationship" to Al Qaeda. The one conceivable benefit of the invasion, a stable modernizing Iraq, a difficult, risky proposition in any event, was made impossible by Bush incompetence.

Bush has truly put the US at risk. Yet rather than call for new, credible, competent leadership, including Bush's resignation, Republicans still rally around Bush. It's startling really.

Define "something worthwhile" - something that's actually possible. It's rather easy to just say there's something worthwhile to pull out of the whole Iraq affair without defining what that may be. Clearly, any original "something worthwhile" are gone - i.e. WMDs, an Iraqi democracy, etc.

Pray tell, what is your criteria? If it's only in retrospect, it's useless.

How?

JUMPING AT SHADOWS....James Joyner links today to a pair of critics who warn that withdrawing from Iraq would "play into the hands of the jihadist terrorists" (Peter Bergen) and cause al-Qaeda to "rejoice" (Michael Scheuer). That may be true. But.....

Bush has really and truly f___ed us.

And Bin Laden remains at large...

I keep thinking, if our future is really at stake in Iraq, as Bush says, why aren't we fighting harder?

The war on terrorism is no more just about killing OBL than WWII was “just” about killing Hitler or Tojo. To follow your logic, FDR was a fool for going into Guadalcanal or North Africa because those don’t advance us in killing Tojo or Hitler.

I disagree. Attacking Guadalcanal & North Africa directly impacted the Axis war machine - forcing them to spread their resources defending widespread targets. Iraq, OTOH, has become (as many on the left predicted beforehand) a training and recruitment bonanza for terrorists, while the neglected Afghanistan has seen the re-emergence of the Taliban who origianlly enabled the actual attacks on us. I'd even be willing to grant, at least for the sake of argument, that invading Iraq _could have_ hurt AQ, _if_ it had been prosecuted competently, but we are very clearly (to my mind, anyway) where the military _cannot_ fix what's broken over there.

I'm not enough of a diplomat, economist, or area expert to offer a worthwhile suggestion of what _could_ help, but I hear we've still got a few of thoise on the payroll...

So will persisting in our current, failed strategy.

So will increasing our military involvement & stamping out the militias.

So will ... anything else we do in Iraq.

THAT'S WHY INVADING IRAQ WAS A STUPID IDEA. (Well, one reason among many.)

So, rather than worrying what al-Qaeda says, let's get out of Iraq ... and go after Qaeda.

Your a bit behind in the news cycle. The NYT leak of classified information purporting to say that the Iraq war increased AQ recruitment was put in context when the rest of the summary was released. Specifically, US being seen to lose would really increase AQ recruitment and the AQ being seen to lose in Iraq would really decrease AQ recruitment. Not the most brilliant of analysis (I think my sons middle school classmates could have figured that out), but at least it puts things in some context.

legion,
The war on terrorism is no more just about killing OBL than WWII was "just" about killing Hitler or Tojo. To follow your logic, FDR was a fool for going into Guadalcanal or North Africa because those don't advance us in killing Tojo or Hitler.

As to the other, if you can't see the way AQ would use a US withdrawal from Iraq now as "a surrender by the US" then you might want to look at how OBL compared the US withdrawal of Somalia. Like Vietnam, we can "declare victory and go home", but that doesn't mean we really would win, that there wouldn't be adverse effects in the region or that we didn't really lose.

ACTUALLY TRY TO KILL HIM!

* What we're doing in Iraq right now has exactly _zero_ with finding bin Laden, stopping AQ, or protecting America from terrorism.

* Pulling our troops out of Iraq is _not_ the same as surrendering to terrorists.

One of these days, people will begin to grasp these ideas...