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Even if we could grant the cut-and-run caucus its fondest wish and remove our presence from Iraq on November 8, we would still be a country at war. The sad fact is there are millions of very dangerous people who loathe us and intend us great harm.

One can make arguments that the administration should have prosecuted the war differently. On the right side of our political spectrum, there is currently a spirited debate regarding the quality of the Bush administration’s efforts, Donald Rumsfeld’s value, troop levels in Iraq and what to do about Iran, Syria and North Korea.

But what you don’t see on the political right or in the Republican Party is denial. You don’t see a childish worldview that American withdrawal will make us safe. You see a grim if often unstated acknowledgement of our distressing reality – we’re in for a long war, and there will be a lot more blood spilled on all sides before it is done.

On the Democratic side, all you see is a blissful lack of awareness of that reality. Whenever you hear a Democratic politician whine for the involvement of the global community or some other simplistic claptrap plan that will purportedly bring an instant end to the world’s turmoil, you’re seeing the evidence of spoiled-brat thinking that holds that even the most intractable problems can be solved easily and painlessly. Were it only so. Even if the Democrats don’t realize it, we’re all going to have to roll up our sleeves and get dirty before this war is won.

They are not just wrong, but dangerously misguided. Iran doesn’t want peace. The Syrian Baathists don’t want peace. The fundamentalist terror groups like Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah don’t want peace. Nor does the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or millions of fanatical Salafists in Saudi Arabia. We have a lot of malefactors out there, and they’re not going to be mollified by a “more sensitive” war on terror.

We can only wish denial was the modern left’s biggest problem. They actually believe that America mid-wifed terrorism and Radical Islam. They view America as the bad guy and American actions as the deus ex machina that made the world the dangerous place it is today. You can try to talk such people out of their views by pointing to the Muslim Brotherhood of the Saudi Salafists who have had global dreams of conquest before George W. Bush came out of the oil fields. But that just confuses them – they’ve never heard of either entity and thus figure they surely don’t matter.

You can then try to reduce the argument to the simple facts that the first attack on the World Trade Center, the bombing of the embassies, the attack on the Cole and 9/11 all happened before the current Iraq war. But even that doesn’t register. They refuse to relinquish the mindset that America caused its own problems.

In a way, this viewpoint serves them as a security blanket of sorts. Their simplistic logic holds that if American actions caused all our problems, then a reversal of course could make all those problems vanish. Thus, they focus on a the evils of the “Rethuglicans”, which is surely a more pleasant mental exercise than picturing what we’re actually going to have to go through before this country and the world are safe.