The sands are shifting in the debate over withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. The primary argument no longer seems to be along the lines of whether troops should be withdrawn, but when.

I agree with Jules Crittenden (via Glenn Reynolds) that withdrawal would be very dispiriting for this country, and would lead to America sitting around and awaiting a "dark age:

...in which brutal second-rate powers such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea do what they choose to whom they choose without restraint. An age of modern warlords, with no over-arching, feared power to keep them in check. We can watch the sick man that is Europe slowly succumb. We can watch small free nations try to fend for themselves. We can await the inevitable nuclear crisis.

Crittenden thinks we are at a crossroads, between fighting on the one hand and defeat and surrender on the other:

The Democratic Congress, so eager to abandon Iraq, is fortunate. The world that seems to revile us no matter what we do is also fortunate. Because it will not be their decision.

We have a president who understands what is at stake. This week he will tell us what it is going to be. All signs indicate he recognizes the mistakes of the past, errors such as are often made in war, and he intends to do what is right. That would be the harder choice, to fight now, when we are tired and feel spent. But, as another American once said, we have not yet begun to fight.

It is his decision to make, and it will fall to a small number of our fellow Americans to execute. It falls to each of us to join the fight in the best way we can. We can be grateful that we still have men and women who are willing to face death for us, who make their choice every day. We are very fortunate to have them. Because Option One, accepting surrender and defeat, is no option at all.

In a lecture in Philadelphia last month, Charles Krauthammer made a very articulate argument that the United States had reached it's apogee in the post-9/11 period:

Sept. 11 ushered in the second era of this unipolar era, which I would call the era of assertion, where the power that had been latent in America shows itself. I would date this era from 9/11 to the March 14, 2005, a date probably unfamiliar to you and not particularly renowned in our history today, but a date that I think will be remembered by historians as the apogee of American power, the peak of the arc of the unipolar era.

On 9/11, the United States, with its ally Great Britain, decided that it would respond in two ways: revenge and reconstruction. It would retaliate against the enemy, try to pursue him and his associates in Afghanistan and elsewhere; but it also decided -- and this was the Bush Doctrine -- that that was not enough of a response; that spending the next twenty to thirty years hunting cave-to-cave in Afghanistan was not an adequate response. It was perhaps necessary, but certainly not sufficient, to deal with this new ideological enemy. This enemy is not, as some have pretended, simply a band of terrorists and extremists numbering in the thousands. It's an idea with many, many practitioners of different stripes--some Shiite, some Sunni--and with allies, fifth columns, potential recruits throughout the world, including large immigrant populations in the West.

The Bush Doctrine held that besides attacking the immediate enemy who had perpetrated 9/11, it would have to engage in a larger enterprise of changing the underlying conditions which had given birth to this idea of Islamic radicalism, and to change the conditions that had allowed it to recruit and breed, particularly in the Arab world.

This meant changing the internal structure of Arab regimes and in a larger sense the culture of the Arab/Islamic world. This had been the one area of the world that uniquely had been untouched by the modernizing and democratizing influences of the postwar era. East Asia had famously taken off economically and politically, in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere; Latin America and even some parts of Africa had democratized; of course, Western Europe had been democratic ever since World War II, but now Eastern Europe had joined the march. Only the Arab/Islamic world had been left out. Unless it was somehow encouraged and brought along on that march, it would remain recalcitrant, alienated, oppressed, tyrannical, and the place from which the kind of atavistic attacks on America and the West that we have seen on 9/11 and since would continue.

That's why the entire enterprise of changing the culture of the Arab world was undertaken. It was, as I and others had said at the time, a radical idea, an arrogant idea, a risky idea. But it was also the only idea of any coherence and consistency that anyone has advanced on how to change the underlying conditions that had led to 9/11 and ultimately to prevent the kind of conditions that would lead to a second 9/11.

What worries me is the stubborn need for denial that we are at war. It's as if 9/11 can be forgotten now, and we can all get back to the "real" business of the country.

Such as? I don't know; fill in the blanks. Global Warming, perhaps? Higher taxes? Illegal aliens? Health care? How about the "war on drugs"?

Anything but the war we're in.

Political analyst Dick Polman sees the war in terms of politics, and argues that many Republicans are running away from Bush:

....politically speaking, there is a growing desire to cut and run from Bush. The first order of business is to make it clear that rank-and-file Republicans don't share the president's urge to "surge." Sen. Susan Collins of Maine doesn't like it. Neither does Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who says: "I think it would create more targets. I think it would put more life at risk." When Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the departing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked last weekend whether he backed a troop surge, he offered this stellar endorsement: "I don't know whether I do or not."

Washington columnist Robert Novak, who has excellent conservative sources, said the other day that roughly 37 of the 49 Republican senators are prepared to bail out on Bush over the troop-escalation plan. That number seems high, in light of the GOP's traditional party discipline. But, at the very least, it's clear that Republicans have studied the '06 election results - particularly the mass defection of independent swing voters - and rightly concluded that they would still be running Capitol Hill if not for Bush's elective war.

They saw what happened to Sen. Rick Santorum in blue-state Pennsylvania; he was actually more hawkish than Bush, and he lost by 18 percentage points. They also saw what happened to Sen. Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island; he said last fall that he would consider the surge idea but changed his tune after he took a lot of heat. He lost anyway, basically because he shared Bush's party label.

I suppose it's naive to talk about such things as statesmanship, but I think we could use some right now.

I see a few signs of it, but it's mostly limited to the blogosphere.

It's almost comical that someone as cynical as I am would advocate such a thing as statesmanship. Seriously, in the normal context of politics, the word makes me laugh.

(But it's harder and harder to laugh at things that aren't funny.)