# Posted 9:46 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

"THERE'S ABOUT 5,000 Al-QAIDA [FIGHTERS] IN IRAQ." Not exactly what you expect to hear from a Democratic senator, now is it? And I don't mean Joe Lieberman. He doesn't count.

Those are actually the words of Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who voted against the war in 2003.

The second time that Levin mentioned Al Qaeda in Iraq during his interview on NBC, he made sure to explain that they were there because of Bush:

There are now 5,000 to 6,000 al-Qaida people in Iraq. There weren’t any, or there were just a handful, prior to the war. Now they’re there because of the policies of this administration.

I'd say that's about right, and it isn't often you hear a Democratic senator even say that there were a handful of Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq before the war. But the real question is where do we go from here?

Levin says he wants to leave a small number of US troops in Iraq after March 2008 in order to train the Iraqis and fight Al Qaeda. But if you told the average American that there were five or six thousand Al Qaeda fighters in Iraq, how many troops do you think they would want to send in? I'm guessing not a few.

The significant presence of Al Qaida also raises two other issues: How would the Arab world interpret a US withdrawal (or drawdown to a Levin-sized contingent)? And what would happen to Iraq after that withdrawal/down?

Levin is adamant that things won't -- or couldn't get worse:

MR. RUSSERT: If, in fact, we withdrew most of the troops out by March of 2008, your goal, and all-out civil war broke out, complete, total chaos in Iraq, what do you do then?

SEN. LEVIN: Well, that’s where we’re heading now.

As far as Sunday morning rhetoric goes, Levin's is the expected response. But it still shows that smart, influential Democrats still aren't grappling with the implications of their proposals. In fact, Levin even insisted twice that "Our proposal is an effort to try to succeed in Iraq."

I guess the easy response to this objection is that it wouldn't be hard to turn up a long list of far more disingenuous or misguided statements made especially by the Vice President and also the President. Levin himself pointed to the infamous "last throes" remark.

But I made it through the first two decades of my life and then some believing wholeheartedly that Democrats were too honest and too intelligent for their own good. Much of my identity as a liberal Democrat was based on the premise that if I wanted to be honest and intelligent, then there was only one party for me.

That same logic remains powerful to this today, with Democrats proudly proclaiming themselves to be part of the "reality-based community". It is that kind of pretension that makes my ears prick up when I hear one Democrat after another insist that there won't be any ethnic cleansing if we pull out of Iraq.

Well, maybe there won't be. I hope there won't be. But I wouldn't count on it.

Labels: Al Qaeda, Carl Levin, Democrats

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