The obvious one is that Iraq becomes a living hell until it either sorts itself into new enclaves inside its own borders or its neighbors come in and devour it.

The less obvious one is that the United States might as well shut down much of our military, since it's going to be a dead certainty that there will never again be a situation where any president will dare to deploy a force overseas for anything lasting longer than about a month. Maybe two weeks. You can take it from there as to what will happen in the world after that, once people--who care nothing about their own casualties or those of civilians--see that we can be cowed.

Remember how Saddam interpreted the end of the first Gulf War?

It isn't going to be like Vietnam. After the fall of Vietnam, aside from hapless boat people, everyone looked the other way and Vietnam dropped off the radar. Won't happen this time. Unlike Vietnam, this time our enemies are going to follow us out.

I still remember Osama's fatwa, written in 1996, when "neocon" was still pretty much an unknown word. Do you?

The depressing part is that this self-defeat would have happened if we had only invaded Afghanistan, too. Same things about the prisons in Guantanamo and elsewhere, same outrage about U.S. and civilian casualties, same bitching about the lack of progress on democracy, same complaining that "a Democrat would have done it better." And, no doubt, Murtha saying we need to "pull out."

There are a few notable exceptions here and elsewhere, but most Democrats who say they would be supporting Bush's foreign policy now if he had never invaded Iraq are lying in their teeth.