The "Rapid Withdrawal Left" is a strawman.

Isn't it? It's a convenient excuse for "moderate" Dems in Congress to sit on their hands and take no action on the war.

It certainly is a goal of the left to extract the US from a war it shouldn't have been involved in in the first place as quickly as possible. But as far as I can tell, the primary urgency on the left is to change the war policy. Or am I missing something? It's certainly what I want first and foremost: an admission, as explicit as the Congress dares to make it, that the Iraq war was a disastrous blunder that cannot be "won," because "victory" is meaningless. Withdrawal cannot happen until someone in power takes responsibility for the reality of the war and takes control away from the dreamers who blundered us into the mess in the first place.

in the mind of a rapist engaged in a rape. The 'left brain' demands immediate withdrawal, as does the victim of the rape. The 'right brain' demands that the rapist must continue the rape until the 'job is done'.

This leftist demands immediate withdrawal, demands that the crime stop now, demands that the only issue here is what should be done after we stop raping Iraq.

There certainly are many people of the pacifist persuasion, I'm sure here on DU especially, who want an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. I think most of those people are aware, however, that you won't get the withdrawal without an overt statement of policy change. There has to be a meeting of realism with idealism or nothing will get done.

I view the pacifist's role as that of national conscience, insisting on total victory, if you will, for the cause of peace. But I'm also aware that in reality, the entire machinery of the US government is in a radically opposite gear. It has to be shifted in order for any movement toward peace to occur--it will not budge at all without an assertion of control, or even a forceable appropriation of it away from the Bushists--and the only hope to have it shifted lies in the Democratic Congress freshly in power now.