Related to my earlier post: Why candidates aren’t talking about what to do in Iraq.

The main reason is that nobody knows what the hell to do about it. And unfortunately, our political environment hinders any real discussion: almost everyone, Democrat and Republican alike, is afraid of being tarred as a weak-willed terror-lover. That Slate piece describes some of the ideas that people have come up with.

That said, maybe Mike’s right and we need to just get the hell out of there.

Eh, I don’t frickin’ know. If I knew, I’d be president.

From a comment on the blog Balkinization:

This is the fear that permeates the Democratic party — and everyone can smell it. You don’t win by being mealy-mouthed and afraid that Hannity and Rush are going to distort what you say. This is really my point: they are going to distort what they say and cudgel them with it no matter what they say or do. Therefore, stop trying to tailor what you say and do based on the fear that it will be distorted and used against you.

Amen! Amen! Ding ding ding ding ding.

Now if only most Democratic politicians would learn this.

David Ignatius writes in a terrific piece in the Washington Post:

This should be the Democrats’ moment, if they can translate the national anger over Iraq into a coherent strategy for that country. But with a few notable exceptions, the Democrats are mostly ducking the hard question of what to do next….

I wish Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter) were asking this question: How do we prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state? Many critics of the war would argue that the worst has already happened — Iraq has unraveled. Unfortunately, as bad as things are, they could get considerably worse.

I think a lot of people see the Iraq situation as a bad one, but not one that they’d actually like to fix. We probably need more troops there, not less, but we’re out of troops – yet most people would oppose a draft. We probably need to put more money into fixing Iraq, as long as it’s spent wisely – yet most people would probably oppose a tax increase to pay for it.

Most people see Iraq as a big nuisance, something bad that they see on TV, something to get angry about but not something that actually affects them. That’s true about many things in the news – stories create a negative emotional response, but it’s a distant response, blocked by the barrier of the TV screen, the computer screen, the newspaper. It’s not something that actually affects most of us in a concrete way, so we feel as bad about it as we feel about seeing a favorite TV character put in a bad position. We root for things to get better, but we don’t really have anything invested in it except our emotions.

I think that’s how most of us feel about Iraq. “Damn shame. It makes me so angry. Now what’s for dinner?”