The conventional wisdom, in essence, holds that running stridently against the war spells political doom for the Democrats. It also holds, however, that running stridently against the war is unnecessary because the Republicans will end the war anyway. Meanwhile, the Republicans are supposed to be doing this for political purposes. These things can’t, however, all be true. ~Matt Yglesias 

Couldn’t it be the case that ending the war would be good politically for the GOP because people instinctively trust them not to be too dovish, but bad for the Dems because people worry they are too soft? I’m not saying this is rational or correct, but it seems perfectly plausible. Moreover, something similar was the case in 1972. People wanted to end the war, but voted for Nixon (who also said he wanted to end the war) instead of McGovern. Could this not be the case today? ~Isaac Chotiner

He has a point.  Yglesias would be right if he said that all these things are logically contradictory, but that in no way prevents them all from reflecting the confused state of public opinion on the war.  In the Democratic field of candidates, it has been the candidates who try to appear generally “strong” on national security (Obama’s call to rule the world being one example of taking a tough posture) who have had the most success advancing their claims that they would end the Iraq war.  In the ever more loopy world of GOP candidates, it has been the candidates who claim that they will end the war (by “winning” it) that have tended to gain the most traction.  It is possible that the only way a Democratic candidate wins while also arguing for an end to the war is by being even more militant about other foreign threats than the Republican candidate.  Obama could say, playing off of his response to Mike Gravel, “We can’t waste any more time in Iraq–we have to get ready to nuke Pakistan!”  Whether this makes sense or not will be immaterial–it will make him look “decisive” and “bold,” which we know from long experience the public values more than “intelligent” and “wise.” 

Even though a significant part of every antiwar argument is that Iraq is bad for our national security, anxious voters may not believe advocates of withdrawal that they actually have a good idea of what is necessary for national security.  Despite the fact that Iraq should have destroyed any confidence the public had in Republican foreign policy ideas for a long time, the Democrats seem to be dogged by the public’s sense that they don’t just oppose wars because they are not efficient or successful, but sometimes even oppose them because they are wrong and stupid.  This is apparently still not a popular position to take.

The difference between this election and 1972 is that one party is clearly not even promising to end the war in the foreseeable future.  The GOP candidates don’t generally talk about “peace with honor,” but instead insist that the war not only can be won, but it must be won.  They have raised Iraq to such a place of centrality and importance in the “war on terror” and in their common ideology that they cannot now abandon the cause without making a mockery of their entire foreign policy position.  It would be as if the Democrats ran in 1952 on a platform of total victory in the Korean War and declared that anyone who wanted an armistice was more or less in league with the communists.  They would have lost by an even larger margin than they did.  1952, not 1972, may be the more appropriate comparison on this particular point.