From the current Weekly Standard editorial:
The task in these [upcoming congressional] hearings, then, is not just to explain and defend the president’s plan, but to make the point that it is better than any plausible alternative, especially withdrawal. Committee members should not be allowed to get away with simply criticizing the president’s plan. They must also explain what they would propose instead. And if what they propose is withdrawal, then they must be asked to explain how that would work. And they should be asked to answer a few basic questions about how they would deal with the consequences of withdrawal. How would they respond to the eruption of full-blown civil war in Iraq and the massive ethnic cleansing it would produce? How would they respond to the intervention of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran, Syria, and Turkey? And most important, what would they propose to do if, as a result of our withdrawal and the collapse of Iraq, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups managed to establish a safe haven from which to launch attacks against the United States and its allies? Would they favor another invasion of Iraq to root out these terrorist bases? Or would they tolerate the establishment of another terror base, bigger and better funded than the one that developed in Afghanistan?
