Silence of the Dems - Just days after their House and Senate victories, Congressional Democrats are preparing to lead the stampede out of Iraq. They - for today's purposes, in the person of Sen. Carl Levin - now speak in terms of a timeframe of "four to six months." To the Left, it is just as well that we leave Iraq to it's own devices, which is to say to the disenfranchised pro-Baathist Sunni, the murderous Shiite militias or to the foreign insurgents whose sworn goal is to sow death and destruction in Iraq and elsewhere.

However it is interesting that in all of their strutting and fretting about Washington, Democrats have yet to utter one syllable as to where they see the next front in the Global War on Terror, preferring to drone on about raising the minimum wage, combating global warming, providing Congressional oversight (read harassing the administration about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the SWIFT program and the NSA's electronic surveillance activities) and the all-important task of stonewalling President Bush's judical picks.

At best, Democrats pay lip service to the GWOT by speaking of "finding Osama" or "finishing the job in Afghanistan," as if al-Qaeda were some sort of discrete and localized malignancy, and not a systemic threat to civilization. All of this feeds into the stereotypes that liberals have worked so hard lately to disabuse us of. And it ultimately speaks to the Left's grudge against the Iraq War, and for that matter, the GWOT itself.

For progressives in America, this war - much like any war America might be involved in - is inconvenient because it distracts America from their “skim, no-whip lattes for everybody” agenda. Unfortunately, death goes on to reap what life has sown when America takes a holiday from guarding the freedoms of others unable to do so. The dead of Kigali, Srebrenica and Halabja speak to the perils of American navel-gazing. But the mass graves of Rwanda, Yugoslavia or Iraq seem to mean little to progressives.

Indeed, if, as the Left still claims, it was wrong for us to use our military in concert with our allies to fight Islamists in Iraq, would it also be wrong to fight Islamic fundamentalists in Iran or Syria, or in either Egypt, Somalia, or Saudi Arabia, or for that matter Bali, Jakarta or the Philippines? Democratic indifference notwithstanding, the central question remains if we cannot muster the emotional stamina or the intestinal fortitude to confront those in Iraq who seek our deaths en masse, where - and under what circumstances - will we confront them?