Watching Larry King a few minutes ago, I saw Walter Cronkite opine that "we now have a great excuse to get out of Iraq."

The "excuse"? "Natural disasters," of course.

"We cannot afford both."

Which means, according to Cronkite, that we should now tell the world that "we're terribly, terribly sorry" and simply get out of Iraq.

A few weeks ago, Dean Esmay anticipated the Cronkite argument:

From my perspective, it is far, far too late to start bringing up questions about funding priorities now, except maybe in the sense of bringing them up if another war is proposed. For this war, the die is cast. Furthermore, there is no denying the truth: if we pull up stakes and abandon those people in Iraq, we will have done something more immoral and more terrible than we ever did by going there in the first place. The power vacuum we would leave behind would result in a crushing blow against human rights. It wouldn't just be a great shame to the United States, it would be a great shame to the entire human race.

But what about the great Walter Cronkite saying we now have a great excuse?

Unfortunately, Dean doesn't think Walter's excuse is much of a moral argument:

People who attack the war effort don't like being questioned on moral grounds, but too bad! This is a fundamentally moral question. I never stopped phrasing my support for this mission in moral terms, and I won't stop now. Because I meant it then and I mean it now: opposition to liberation of Iraq is and always has been morally vacuous. One could argue against it for purely pragmatic reasons--we can't afford it, we have other priorities--but we cannot pretend those are moral arguments. They're also irrelevant--we committed to this almost three years ago and can't go back in time and undo it.

Excuse me, but I don't think I want to live in a great excuse.