Is anyone else disappointed with Al Franken's daily defense of the continued war in Iraq? Not Bush's version of the war, because that would undermine Air America's laudable purpose of rallying an anti-Bush audience. But, well, Kerry's version of the war, one that can be better managed and won, somehow with better body armor and fewer torture cells. This morning Franken was endorsing Sen. Joe Biden's proposal to send 5,000 NATO troops to close the Syrian-Iraq border, bring in foreign trainers for the Iraqi officer corps, and put Iraqis to work cleaning up the destruction of our invasion. "Last chance to get it right."

But get what right? Now that Bush has manipulated us into the invasion, Franken thinks, we have no choice but to...stay until we crush the insurgents. It's a humanitarian excuse for open-ended American occupation. And it's shared widely by the professional political and pundit class who think of themselves as the conscience of the American establishment and the leadership of the Democratic Party.

It gets worse. Last week the Center for American Progress, a lavishly-funded think tank mainly for Clinton officials in exile, issued a paper calling for greater efforts at military recruiting to fulfill our "moral" obligations in Iraq.

Who knows, maybe it's possible to "crush the insurgency", "fix the pottery", and leave. The estimated calendar for these achievements runs from two years (Biden) to five or ten years (Pentagon sources). That's at one billion dollars per week.

Meanwhile, the majority of Iraqis, the people these humanitarian hawks seek to save, want the US to set a timetable for withdrawal. One hundred thousand have marched in Baghdad's streets for withdrawal. This week 82 members of the Iraqi parliament issued a statement demanding US withdrawal and criticising their leadership for reneging on pledges made to Iraqi voters.

Our government is the chief provocateur of the insurgency. Our government has installed a Shiite regime whose security forces are killing Sunnis. Our government is ignoring Iraqi opinion, and even Iraqi parliamentarians, who want to take their chances in an Iraq without our occupation.

Why can't Air America "liberals" support the Iraqi peace movement?