Liberal Talk Radio

I was watching Bill O’Reilly fight with Phil Donahue on the O’Reilly show the other day, and it was uncomfortable for a number of reason. First, watching O’Reilly get mad just makes my skin crawl. Second, Donahue was stretching a LOT to defend Cindy Sheehan, and thus making me feel some weird cognitive dissonance, because I didn’t want to be put in a position of either defending Sheehan or siding with O’Reilly.

But the most uncomfortable thing about the exchange was that the two were basically in agreement on the war, so far as American troops are concerned. Donahue says we need to leave, O’Reilly accuses him of “cutting and running.” But the honest truth is that the generals on the ground in Iraq all basically agree that we’re going to leave Iraq sometime within the next six months to a year. Even the 100,000 folks who protested in DC this past weekend, the ones who want us out of Iraq “now,” surely acknowledge that Bush can’t just pick up the phone and have 140,000 American troops and all their support equipment home by tomorrow afternoon, don’t they??

What I’m saying is, if we admit that it’s going to take 6-12 months minimum to leave Iraq, then even if the anti-war protesters get their way we’ll still have troops on the ground until well into 2006, which is to say exactly when the generals are planning on leaving anyway! In other words, there’s no tangible, tactical difference between the pro-war folks and the anti-war folks at this point. It’s just a lot of sound and fury. Mickey Kaus makes the point much more eloquently:

As Ignatius notes, in terms of what we should do now, as opposed to whether the war was the right thing to launch in the first place, there is vastly less practical difference between the “pro-war” and non-fringe “anti-war” positions than either side’s rhetoric would lead you to believe (and vastly less than the equivalent difference during Vietnam).

Can’t we all just get along? By this time next year we’ll have either zero or significantly fewer troops in Iraq, no matter who gets their way (unless you’re like Prof. Matski and you believe that we’re going to keep our troops there as a forward position against China). So what’s all the fuss about?