Senator Hillary Clinton has repeatedly promised that of the Congress doesn’t end the Iraq war by next year, then as president, she will. Who’s being naïve now?

Surely, you can end a war by admitting defeat and withdrawing your forces. You can as long as your opponent is a conventional one. However, in unconventional conflict, like the Iraq War, withdrawal doesn’t end the war, but instead it changes the landscape of the conflict.

Whether Sen. Clinton wants it or not, she may not be able to end this war, even if the country decided to elect her. To claim that she will end the war is naïve and overtly political. It also sets a dangerous president of candidates making declarations of future strategy or military decisions without taking into consideration the opinions of generals in the field. This is not to mention the fact that the very landscape of this conflict could be completely different in one year’s time.

Here’s where the neocons have it right, though it pains me to say it, because they got us into Iraq under dubious pretenses and numerous deceptions. For two years they have equated retreat in Iraq with losing a major battle in a global conflict on terror. Though they often use this piece of strategic thought in overtly political ways, equating it with doomsday scenarios to question the patriotism and resolve of political rivals, it doesn’t make the belief any less sound. It appears to be a piece of propaganda because it is used that way. However, it doesn’t make it wrong.

Widespread withdrawal from a shooting war in Iraq, one that is both an ethnic conflict as well as a very active campaign against terrorism, is a concession of defeat in that war. I am not saying that we shouldn’t concede this defeat – for many battles surely are lost before a war can be won - but to say that withdrawal is anything but a concession of defeat is putting lipstick on a pig. It certainly does embolden our enemies, it does send a bad message to those who are teetering on the boundary between extremism and normalcy in the region, and it destroys what little credibility we have left in the Middle East.

I fundamentally believe that if we withdraw our forces, as Clinton and others want to do, then this campaign against terror will only shift in focus but not in severity. The prospects of this are grim and too speculative for a serious person to engage in print, but I think that the thoughts have crossed all of our minds, when we consider what would happen if Al Qaeda in Iraq wins a major victory and become ambitious as a result.

Clinton and the other Democratic candidates frequently reference Afghanistan as a justified conflict worthy of more funding and troops. They are surely right. However, by withdrawing from Iraq, they hope to repeat the past by focusing on the just war thee instead of on the battles we are already fighting. You can’t go back to 2002 again and act like Iraq never happened because the instability there, no the war being fought there, will have ramifications beyond the borders of that nation far deeper within Middle Eastern culture than we can now fathom.

I don’t mean to play the neocon line here because I hate the neocon line for screwing this thing up from the beginning, but I think it is important that we know what we are voting for when we vote for the anti-war candidate. All rational people are anti-war; all of you probably are, because to be anti-war is to value human life over the ambitions of tyrants or of the ideological blindness of ambitious nations. Americans are individualistic, we believe in people and value them, and that’s what makes each loss of a serviceman so painful. This is also why we are so reluctant to go to war.

But whether we like it or not we have to see the Iraq War through. We need to expect our politicians to view this conflict with the seriousness and strategic learning that it requires and not with cheap sound bites that play on our emotions. If Senator Clinton wants to get us out of Iraq, she should be talking to ex-generals who know a thing or two about shooting wars, and find a way to win. Or has the word Victory out of fashion?