Finally. Columnist Roger Cohen (IHC/NYTimes) states the obvious today. This is not meant to be a dig against him, but instead, I mean to praise his column. Writing for a lefty publication syndicate, one that has been hard (for good reason) on the war and soft on the anti-war movement, Cohen says plainly that, “the United States must keep a military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future.”

So why is this remarkable? Because he is able to put aside all discussion of causality in this horrid war, all discussion of withdrawal timelines and presidential candidate namby pamby on the issue, and instead tells us what we already know. That is something we know but that nobody seems willing to talk about. If we pull our troops out of Iraq there will be anarchy and reprisal killings by the score and possibly a broader war. The Iraqi government, lacking even its own security force to conduct its meetings and protect its officials, will likely collapse. The divisions between the hundreds of gangs and sects in the streets will become deeper and a further escalation of violence is the likely result.

Cohen uses this realistic appraisal, this potential for complete regional disaster, as the primary humanitarian argument in favor of a prolonged occupation of a regional security force backed, supposedly, by the US and the UN. Though I have serious misgivings about the credibility of the UN to do anything aside from providing bureaucratic jobs to do-gooders, it’s an interesting and progressive proposal.

It is also reflective of something very sad in our political culture especially in our prolonged campaign season of 2007-08. The few friends that I keep, a list growing smaller and more elite by the fortnight are interested in what people like Cohen have to say far more than anything we hear from presidential candidates. Most mornings, I wake with a series of forwarded articles in my inbox, captivating op/eds mostly, but pieces almost exclusively written by career journalists and not by aspirant politicians or by clever academicians.

From Clinton to McCain and from Edwards to Romney we haven’t heard a sensible and convincing war plan from either side of the political quagmire. Both sides are panderers, including the beloved and canonized Obama, whose phased withdrawal is an obtuse public statement of pandering obviousness. Clinton has no leadership, McCain wants to throw everything but the kitchen sink into Iraq, and Giuliani’s too busy telling us why he thinks he’d make a good warlord to come up with a strategy that people can believe in.

The obvious person I am leaving out is the President but nobody but Barney really cares what he thinks anymore, and from what I hear, Barney’s only listening for the bacon bits.

So instead we have columnists to speculate for us what it would be like to have leader that had the gumption, credibility, and public forum to address a pragmatic approach to a bloody awful war we shouldn’t have gotten into but have no choice but to fight. My hat of off to people like Cohen but their job scribbling something twice a week, though a daunting task to do with any degree of quality, is a lot easier than getting elected to high office. At the same time, it doesn’t say anything about the candidate’s collective desire to get this thing right in Iraq if they can’t tell us what they want to do specifically, right now, as a reasonable alternative to the waywardly inept policy of this failed Presidency. Leadership is more than stamina on the campaign trail. It about a maintaining a balance between realism and hope.