It didn't take long. Just a week after their election victory, the new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi nominated anti-war hero Jack Murtha as the new House Majority Leader -- the not insignificant post as the head of the Democratic Party in Congress. While Murtha was defeated for the position, the message from Pelosi and the the Democrats who now run Congress is pretty clear: begin drawing down American troops from Iraq within six months, regardless of the political or security situation on the ground. Pelosi herself has said without equivocation that the Democrats main mission is to "get out of Iraq" -- beginning what will assuredly be a steady and growing pressure on the President to retreat -- whether or not the job we've started is finished.

While there is much to lament about this turn of events, the most regrettable will likely be the impact it has on the core of US national security strategy since 9/11. You may remember that in 2002 the Bush Administration made what was a novel (and controversial) change to include the notion of "preemptive war" to the country's national security policy. Preemptive war was a direct response to the nature of the new terrorist threat that became apparent in the aftermath of September 11. It was a cornerstone of a post-Cold War policy that took into account that threats were not easily understood and not easily deterred -- and that terrorism directed against civilians on the scale of 9/11 or greater was not something that the US could afford to wait around for.

Thus, the "doctrine of preemption" has animated the Bush foreign policy since 9/11 -- and the most obvious example of this has been Iraq. The US invaded Iraq in 2003 as a preventative measure -- believing that a Saddam with nuclear and biological weapons was a danger that couldn't be ignored. Though we had no specific information that Saddam was preparing an attack against the US or Israel, the belief that Saddam could align with Al Qaeda and provide Islamic terrorists with weapons of mass destruction was considered a clear and present danger -- worthy of preemptive action.

While historians will continue to argue whether Iraq did or did not have an active WMD program, the fact remains that the US and all major European nations believed that it did, and that there was at least a reasonable chance that these WMD would fall into the hands of terrorists. Invading Iraq was a reflection of a post 9/11 understanding of the world: if terrorists will fly fuel-laden jetliners into buildings, they'd just as likely use nuclear weapons to accomplish their ends. If we can eliminate Hussein's WMD program, we could potentially eliminate a substantial threat to the United States.

Isn't it entirely reasonable that preemption should be a critical component of any post-9/11 security program? We live in a world of "asymmetric" warfare -- where civilians are the primary targets by suicide bombings carried out by attackers who come from no specific nation and wear no uniform. The nature of the threats we face has changed since the end of the Cold War -- and our prescriptions for how to fight them must necessarily change as well.

Unfortunately, the Democrats in Congress -- like the anti-war Left of all stripes -- don't believe in preemption. Many of them don't believe that war is ever justified, no matter what the reason. It may be hard to believe, but there are those on the Left who would not have preemptively attacked Hitler's Germany in 1938 -- even knowing (as we do today) that such action could have saved Europe's Jews from extinction and prevented the deaths of the tens of millions who perished during World War Two. These are people who fundamentally believe that might never makes right, and who can't distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys. It's moral reletevism to an extreme and dangerous degree: all violence is bad, and the circumstances never matter. A preemptive war -- even in the pursuit of objectives that eliminate evil and prevent the death of innocents -- is thus never justified, because such a war brings us down to the level of those we are attacking. Down is up and up is down.

Sadly, we will wait next time until we are already attacked again before we call to arms in our own defense. In a world where Iran is building a bomb and the liklihood of zealots getting access to WMD grows with each and every passing day, the death of preemption may turn out to be Iraq's biggest casualty of war.