That’s Captain Ed Morrissey’s take on the Democrats’ new national security plan.

As he argues, the Dems basically want to abandon Iraq — where our enemies are arrayed and where our military is actually in position to engage them — and, they claim, redeploy in a “smarter” way that targets bin Laden.

Two problems. Frist, if bin Laden is holed up in Pakistan, how do you do more than what we are currently doing — working with Musharraf, who helps us to the extent allowed by his tenuous position in a country where bin Laden could win a democratic election — without further destabilizing the country and perhaps ushering in a jihadist nuclear power?

Second, when Democrats complain about bin Laden’s still being on the loose, they always conveniently omit that President Clinton turned down a chance to grab him from Sudan in 1996, and that bin Laden has been under indictment in the United States since months BEFORE the 1998 embassy bombings. We did nothing to capture him then, we did nothing to capture him after our two embassies were blown to smithereens, and we did nothing (indeed, didn’t even bother with the usual fig leaf of filing an indictment) when al Qaeda bombed the Cole in October 2000.

Having had years to do something, and having instead done nothing, why should anyone believe Democrats are now suddenly more likely to get smarter and tougher on bin Laden than President Bush — who has significantly degraded al Qaeda even if he hasn’t yet managed to bag bin Laden, who has dismantled the Taliban (which the Clinton administration allowed brazenly to harbor bin Laden for years), and who at least has Pakistan (frequently) working with us rather than against us (the latter being the default position during the Clinton years)?

Why, in other words, should the Democrats’ national security claims not be judged by reference to THEIR OWN past performance, rather than just vis-a-vis the President’s?

There is a lot to criticize in the way Iraq operations have been handled, from conceptualization straight through execution. And many of us To-Hell-With-Them types wish there was a lot more focus on killing terrorists and a lot less concern about democratization.

But even we democracy-project doubters have to concede that we need to expend energy to try to make Iraq reasonably stable and viable, even if it’s not (and probably never going to be) Philadelphia circa 1787.

Meanwhile, the enemy is THERE and still fighting. If we ever leave before the enemy is defeated, it would confirm everything bin Laden has been telling his followers, for years, about how they can win because we lack the resolve. That would be just the shot in the arm al Qaeda needs. It would guarantee future aggression and thus be an unmitigated disaster for our national security.