Yesterday, I took off on Tom Friedman for declaring that liberals "don't want the Bush team to succeed in Iraq," and further argued that the war - from the perspective of the struggle against al Qaeda - was a strategic disaster for the United States. I'm going to expand a little further on that subject now.

One of the main themes of terrorism is that there is no good policy option for its target. Doing nothing is obviously not an option, and the "offense-defense balance" is heavily weighted in favor of terrorists - basically meaning that the terrorist only has to be right once, while the counterterrorist has to be right all the time. There are always potential problems with virtually every single response to response. Which is why, I suppose, so many groups choose it as a tactic to further their ideological ends. Essentially, it leaves you in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. This is the strategic situation we now face in Iraq.

To paraphrase Richard Clarke, it was if Osama bin Laden was using some mind-control technique on the members of the Bush administration telling them to invade Iraq. It seemed that we, for some reason, were trying to make bin Laden's case for him. Rather than making bin Laden play a part in our own movie, as we did in Afghanistan, we decided we were going to play our designated part in al Qaeda's script. As a result, we completely and utterly undermined our own strategic position vis-a-vis terrorism and the Arab and Islamic worlds. And, as Digby and Matt Yglesias have pointed out, we don't really know why we did it. This is all further confused by Friedman's muddling with his "four reasons" for war. The very fact of our being in Iraq is a strategic problem for the United States.

So the simple solution would be simply to withdraw, right? Wrong. It's not that simple. Ultimately, our binary system of punditry boils down options in to Iraq to withdraw or "stay the course." While I'm generally sympathetic to the argument that we have some sort of moral obligation to at least try to build a democracy in the strategic clusterfuck we've created, the truth of the matter is that there are no good options. Both withdrawal and staying the course are equally bad options. Like Liberal Oasis, I think we need to declaim any sort of permanent military presence and leave Iraq after establishing some sort of stable (and the term is relative here) government. But when we leave Iraq - even if we completely vacate the country - al Qaeda and its affiliates will claim a strategic victory. They'll be able to say that they beat the United States in Iraq like they beat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and their ideological and political appeal will undoubtedly grow. But if we stay, we accomplish exactly the same thing: prove al Qaeda's case for it, by occupying an oil-rich Arab-Muslim nation at the heart of the Middle East. Either way, we're equally screwed.

This is a pickle, no doubt. There is no good option here, and tragically, it is a mess of our own making.