So will Congress give Mr. Bush the money he wants, no questions asked? It probably will, but it shouldn't. Mr. Bush created this crisis, and if he were a true patriot he would pay a political price to resolve it. Maybe it's time for him to do a couple of things he's never done before, like admitting mistakes and standing up to the hard right.

"Surprised", because Krugman seems to be ignoring the dire consequences of not funding the Iraq occupation, and he seemed to me to be much more sensible than that.

I do agree that the ideal would be to force Bush to pay a price, a severe one, for the abomination which has been his Administration's handling of Iraq, but if that's not possible, isn't it more important to consider what our moral obligation to Iraq is, now that we've taken their country apart violently, and haven't been able to put it back together again, or even keep the peace? Will the chaos we're responsible for causing in Iraq get any better if we just pull out?

Isn't that rather like the mindset of the Greens in the 2000 election, preferring to be ideologically pure by voting for Nader rather than doing the pragmatic thing and voting for the candidate who most approaches their ideals but also has a real chance of being elected?

At this point, I certainly hope that the Greens have had a change of heart about that, now that we've had to live through 2 years of disastrous Bush policies, and I see signs that this is the case, that many Greens have decided that getting rid of Bush is more imporant that being pure. Myself, despite what I wrote below about the need for the party not to move more into the center, I am being entirely pratical and will support whoever wins the Democratic nomination as the only viable candidate to get rid of Bush, even if that person is Lieberman, the most centrist of the Dems. Such practical pragmatism is necessary because we are in a distinct and severe crisis, since (and I'm trying not to be overly hyperbolic about this) I think it very possible that this country won't survive as the America we know and love if Bush gets the chance at another 4 years to wreck havoc on the liberal underpinnings of this country, and the infrastructure of international governance (which is not in any way perfect, but which has done, at the very least, a credible job of preventing us from continuing to add roman numerals to the list of World Wars).

So pragmatism really needs to win out over ideological purity (something that is alien to the neocons, clearly), and that means we need to concentrate on, at the very least, stabilizing Iraq before we even think about pulling out. That, of course, is going to take money, which, as I said, is why I'm surprised that Krugman would encourage Congress not to fund the Iraq operation.

Now, if there's some way to fund it while at the same time putting conditions and restrictions on that funding, the way that there should have been conditions and restrictions on the use of force resolution (as I said at the time), that's another matter entirely. Aren't the Democrats, and those realistic Republican critics of the Bush mishandling of Iraq, in a good position to insist on that?