The Timid Politics of War

I expected her chief rivals, Sen. Barack Obama and former senator John Edwards, to go on the attack. Instead, there was studied silence. Obama and Edwards have said nothing so far. Why?

Well, as far as I can tell, they aren't willing to disagree with her strategic premise. "Truth is," a strategist for one of them told me, "almost all proposals anticipate the need for a continued presence of noncombat forces. What she said didn't strike me as all that groundbreaking."

In other words, the Democrats are going to square the circle by fiddling with the definition of what "combat" and "noncombat" mean. A classic Washington solution.

They calculate, as does she, that the route to winning, say, southeastern Ohio, in a general election is to be "tough," which means, in this case, an unflinching willingness to use military force. Contributions from donors who care about Israel's survival and safety are important, especially to Democrats—and an absolutist, America-out-of-the-Middle-East stance is anathema to them.

Will there be a credible all-out "antiwar" candidate in the Democratic race? That's why serious people still think that Al Gore is going to crash the party in Iowa next fall.

The Republicans seem as flummoxed by the politics of the Iraq war as the Democrats do. More of them may be speaking out against the president's course, but when it came time to vote in the Senate, only one of them, Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, broke with the White House.