Tipping Point Against Iraq War?

Heretofore, it has admittedly been difficult for oldstyleliberal to answer the simple question, Should we get out of Iraq? Recent shifts in the attitudes of pundits he respects have brought him to a tipping point, however. He now thinks a "win" in Iraq to be too much to hope for.

"Snake Eyes," a brief article by Hendrik Hertzberg in the August 21, 2006, New Yorker pretty much says it all. Hertzberg compares a recent opinion piece by centrist and former war supporter Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times to the famous on-the-air renunciation of the Vietnam War by Walter Cronkite in 1968. (The Friedman piece may be read for free here.) Friedman writes:

It seemed to me over the last three years that, even with all the Bush team’s missteps, we had to give our Iraqi partners a chance to produce a transitional government, then write a constitution, then hold an election and then, finally, put together their first elected cabinet. But now they have done all of that — and the situation has only worsened ... we can’t throw more good lives after good lives.

Accordingly, says Friedman, "we need to try a last-ditch Bosnia-like peace conference that would bring together all of Iraq’s factions and neighbors ... For such a conference to come about, though, the U.S. would probably need to declare its intention to leave."

And, Hertzberg adds:

In a Washington Post column a day [earlier than Friedman's piece], the relentlessly centrist David S. Broder, citing his colleague Thomas E. Ricks’s new book, “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” admitted that “the hope for victory is gone” and deplored “the answer from Bush,” which he characterized this way: “Carry on. Do not waver. And do not question the logic of prolonging the agony.”

Broder's opinion piece, "Doubling Two Bad Bets?", chastised the Bush administration for its blind stubbornness in holding out for both the total destruction of Hezbollah by Israeli forces in Lebanon and the eventual U.S. quelling of the sectarian insurgents in Iraq.

oldstyleliberal agrees with Friedman and Broder. As Friedman says, "Since the Bush team never gave us a Plan A for Iraq, it at least owes us a Plan B."