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Zakaria on the Dems, Iraq

1:06 PM, Jan 22, 2008 • By MICHAEL GOLDFARB
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Fareed Zakaria writes in the new issue of Newsweek:

The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to "ending the war" and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.

From 2003 to 2005 the war in Iraq was defined by an insurgency. After the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006, it became largely a sectarian conflict. Now the dominant feature of the war is the proliferation of local ceasefires across the country. The real questions that candidates need to answer are these: How do they interpret this new reality? What would they do to maintain the new stability? What does all this mean for U.S. foreign and military policy in the next few years?

Zakaria's "the war has largely ended" formulation already has heads spinning in the lefty blogosphere. I'm not sure I'd be so bold to make that kind of declaration, but it's clear that a seismic shift has taken place on the Iraq issue, and the Dems will have to face facts at some point. And granted, Zakaria isn't quite Walter Cronkite, but reading the piece you get the feeling that somewhere there's a Hillary Clinton staffer wondering if the Democrats are about to lose middle America.

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