Having gone on record as arguing that the classical liberal position suggests that it is high time that the United States extricate its military troops from Iraq (here and here), the question then beomes, How?

One way could be the troop surge that President Bush proposes.

In principle, the proposed surge could fit a classical liberal approach, at least as a response to the situation at this particular time. If the point of a surge is to get out while leaving Iraq in the best shape possible—while recognizing that it is not going to be much like Utah any time soon—a surge could indeed be a classical liberal response to our current situation.

The danger, of course, is that the Bush administration will use the surge to push back the enemy, then remain to "keep the peace," and then watch helplessly as our enemies rearm and resume their counterattacks in a few weeks or months.

Surging, pacifying, and leaving, however, could be a reasonable classical liberal response to the present circumstances.

The goal, after all, is to defend the U.S. population from attack. We have been safe from such attack since 9/11, and the Iraq War may have a good deal to do with that, though I find the evidence far from convincing.

In any case, it is clear that our heavy presence in Iraq spreads our military very thin and hinders us from pursuing other imminent terrorist threats elsewhere.

Noting that polls of Islamic populations show that a large minority of them around the world approve of the notion of terrorist attacks against the United States, Tony Blankley, writing in today’s Washington Times, observes that we simply do not have a plan for combatting the global nature of this threat:

[M]ost importantly, we have not had — even remotely — a national debate on what policies are best judged to reduce radical sentiment in the Muslim world, while also protecting us from potentially imminent terrorist attacks. Rather, we are still having a jolly old time deciding who among us to skin for our past mistakes.

Here, I think, the classical liberal position becomes immensely valuable. In a classical liberal formulation, the role of the government in this arena is to protect the American people from attack. It seems likely that attacks against us are in the planning and set-up stages around the world, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that countering such threats requires the potential for quick U.S. military action to destroy the actual threat and allow a swift return home to prepare for the next problem.

That is the way of things in a world of diversified threats, and the classical liberal approach provides a sound guideline regarding when and how to intervene in response to actual or imminent attacks.

There will always, of course, be empirical questions regarding what is and is not a real threat, but the point of a principle is to give us a way to figure out what to do once we have information. The classical liberal position provides that.

In the current instance, I think that classical liberals should be willing to discuss whether a surge is the best way of getting out of the mess that the United States got into by ignoring these principles. We should keep in mind, however, that the goal of a surge is to get out, not to get in even deeper.