Posted on 12/12/2006 6:42:49 AM PST by Theodore R.
Coming GOP war … over the war!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: December 12, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
"I believe this is a recipe that will lead to our defeat ... in Iraq," said John McCain. He has a point. For what does the Iraq Study Group say?
We are not winning this war. Our situation is "grave and deteriorating." Yet we may succeed if only we will withdraw all U.S. combat brigades in 15 months and bring Syria and Iran to the table to resolve the political crisis. This is simply not credible.
Nowhere in this report are there any "disincentives" to cause al-Qaida, the Sunni insurgents, the militias, the Mahdi Army or sectarian death squads to call off their campaigns to inflict a historic defeat on the United States and expel us from Mesopotamia.
(Column continues below)
The closer one studies the report, the more the truth emerges. These "realists" think Iraq is a lost cause, that Americans will not pay the price in blood, treasure and years to win it. And in this conviction the Baker Commission, too, may be right.
This deepening fissure in the GOP presages a civil war inside the party by 2008, over whether to stay in Iraq – or, if the war has ended in a debacle or defeat, over "who lost Iraq?"
In urging intensified training of the Iraqi army and an expedited withdrawal, the Baker Commission is laying down the predicate for the case that America did not lose this war, Iraqis lost their own war.
This ISG report is less about saving Iraq than about saving the U.S. establishment from being held responsible for the worst strategic blunder in U.S. history. It is about giving Bush and Congress a "decent interval" before Iraq goes down and a Saigon ending ensues.
The neocons are also preparing their defense before the bar of history. Realizing the Baker Commission recommendations point to slow-motion defeat, they are savaging Baker and calling for tens of thousands more U.S. troops to be sent to Baghdad and a new strategy of victory, no matter how much it costs or how long it takes.
If Bush fails to follow their counsel, they will then say: "It was not our fault. It was Bush's rejection of our advice that lost the war."
Neoconservative Ken Adelman, on Sunday's "Meet the Press," was calling for 20,000 to 30,000 more U.S. troops, saying Iraq had been a wise and winnable war, but the administration mucked up what should have been a "cakewalk."
The Democratic establishment, which gave Bush a blank check to take us to war, "to get the issue out of the way" before the midterms in 2002, is also preparing its defense of the role it played in plunging us into Mesopotamia, the "if-only-we-had-known" defense.
"If only we had known then what we know now – that there was no hard evidence of WMD, no hard evidence of al-Qaida ties to Saddam Hussein – we would never have voted for the war." "If only we had known how incompetent Rumsfeld's Pentagon would be in managing the war, we would never have given Bush a green light."
This Kerry-Edwards defense is a version of the 1967 defense advanced by Michigan Gov. George Romney to explain his earlier support of Vietnam. Said Romney, "I was brainwashed" during a trip to Vietnam, prompting the cruel retort of Sen. Eugene McCarthy, "In Romney's case, a light rinse would have sufficed."
The Democrats' defense begs these questions: Why didn't you know? Why didn't you find out? Why didn't you do your constitutional duty and refuse the president the power to go to war until he had convinced you that only war could spare the republic worse horrors?
What the Baker Commission is ultimately all about is providing political cover for a bipartisan retreat from Iraq.
For what was the one issue the Iraq Study Group would not and will not address? The crucial question: Was the Iraq war a blunder to begin with? The commission seeks at all costs to avoid the judgment of the nation that today's establishment that took us into Iraq served America as badly as the Best and Brightest who marched an earlier generation into Vietnam, then cut and ran and called it "Nixon's War."
The media are celebrating the ISG for its "bipartisanship" and the "consensus" achieved. But was it not a bipartisan consensus that produced the war: a Democratic Senate failing in its duty to ascertain the necessity of a war to be launched by a Republican president, because Democrats feared that telling a popular president "no" would reinforce the party's reputation as being soft on national security?
The people who were right about Iraq were those who rejected bipartisanship to warn that invading Iraq was an unnecessary, unwise and, yes, even an unjust war that would inflame the Arab and Islamic world against us. Unsurprisingly, this group had no representative on the Baker-Hamilton Commission.
Hamas. Good. Israel. Bad. Yeah, just like Jimmy Carter.
pat buchanan is a moron.
If a few thousand dead meant you were losing a war, then we've never won one.
This is all about PR -- showing the war out of context. People have no perspective on the war. I talk to Ds, point out this has been far lower casualty count than Iwo Jima, D-Day, Verdun, Gettysburg, etc, etc.
"You can't compare this to those", I'm told.
So, they have no perspective.
The only thing we've lost is the PR war.
The only reasons for intervening in a Muslim country are to search, rescue infidels, foment, destroy, exchange, or to play one side off against another for profit, or to protect Israel. Nation building under Islamic law is self-defeating.
The only way to win is to actually hunt down the militas
the Imams the forigen fighters and slaughter them
and whoever gets in the way, we did not defeat the Nazis
by pussyfooting around like this. So until we start piling up corpses this stalemate will continue.
You're right, of course. But I think that's not the criterion by which many of the electorate believe we're "losing." Rightly or wrongly, they infer from what they see as, to be fair, the chaos, that we are losing. Not militarily, but in the ability of us to achieve the stated goal of a self-sustaining, self-reliant, stable "democracy".
"You can't compare this to those", I'm told.
Here is the basis of our loss in the PR war.
Would you feel bad about paying 400,000 for a beautiful beach front mansion in California that's worth a million or more?
How about paying 3,000 for nothing?
That's why people don't see the WWII/Iraq comparison in values.
The reason that the media can do this is that while people admit WWII had a high price, we reaped tremendous benefits by winning, and we could have paid much, much more. In Iraq, they've convinced people that there is no point in us being there, and every life lost compounds the tragedy. It's like being mugged over and over again, one dollar at a time.
Americans will not "pay the price in blood, treasure, and years..." This is true and the last election proved it. We actually won the war - "shock and awe" was indeed that - but then we decided to go into the business of nation building in an artificial country that had never been a cohesive nation, that had never had any democratic institutions, that was riven by sectarian hatreds, and had already been run into the ground by Saddam Hussein.
Exactly. Not losing militarily. Losing 'politically'.
There's a total lack of perspective. The same way the MSM distorts all stories -- by carefully leaving out contextual information.
If they were to compare this to any other major conflict in American history, it would ruin their 'spin'. If we stay long enough, we will win eventually. It's just a matter of do we have the stomach to take the casualties.
In 30 days of fighting on Iwo Jima, we took over 6000 dead. We bled more over that small island than we have over Iraq. But we just don't have the stomach for a fight anymore.
Our will is weak.
Buchanan uses a lot of words to give himself a pat on the back.
GO Pat GO...Go away, very far away!
I disagree.
These same people were against US entry into WWII, until Pearl Harbor.
The reason we call WWII a big win now, is because of hindsight. The US people were against us getting into that war. And if they had had real-time news telling them about every single mistake, every lost battle . . . we wouldn't have finished WWII either.
You are exactly right on your arguments. The PR was lost by Bush, and its has taken its toll. However, the realpolitik of the situation is that this will not end up like North Korea, where a family of luntics rules and threatens us decades later.
I think you've got that right.
I see this as a paralell to WWII. With Iran as Germany and Syria as Italy.
Iraq, to me, is like the Spanish Civil war (or Algeria, someone else pointed out -- altho now I'm going to have to go research that).
Because . . . who cares? Unless and until the War Powers Act is obliterated, from now on it'll always be the "President's" war, not the "People's." Our Founding Fathers rightly placed the power to go to war in the hands of the Congress because one person (i.e., a president, a king) does not lead a country to war; the people, represented in Congress, do. The War Powers Act is the wrench in the system.
Fortunately, it's better than ever before.
This is really only working on folks older than me. The younger folks, anyone really who gets their info off the internet, is far less susceptable to that.
And I don't think it's a left/right thing specifically. I think that people who go into journalism are people who like to write, and give opinions, but don't have the gumption to actually do anything.
Now that does indeed sound like an L, but even some Cs have that trait. They're in an industry where they comment on things they have no experience in. It's a part of the system.
The only real solution is for people to read the same story from several different sources, that way they'll get both sides.
In other words, the solution is the internet!
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