Next stop is Vietnam

Because the United States lost in Vietnam, by McCain's reasoning, we must compensate by staying in Iraq. We will never be defeated if we never leave.

So entrenched are those lessons that McCain sounds, at times, like he wishes they could be applied retroactively. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal," McCain said at a speech on Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations on Nov. 5, 2003. And for that reason, it might be advisable to take him at his word when he says he'll stay in Iraq for 100 years. Whether Vietnam is the prism through which he judges national security decisions, or the rationale he uses to explain whatever position he decides to take -- and even if the lessons he says he's learned from Vietnam often seem contradictory -- he has applied his Vietnam test to Iraq and come up with the decision to stay.

[snip]

In fact, McCain has applied some lessons to Iraq that seem to conflict with earlier statements about Vietnam. He had previously said, in connection with Somalia, that staying in a war because chaos would ensue on American departure was not a good reason to stay. Last Tuesday, he said the U.S. needed to stay in Iraq because chaos would ensue if we left, as we learned in Vietnam. (And despite having shared in GOP rhetoric during the 1990s disparaging President Clinton's foreign policy initiatives as "nation building," he now publicly embraces remaining in Iraq to build democracy.

The prime lesson McCain seems to be applying to Iraq is that we need to stay in it to win it. In fact, McCain has argued that the United States' failure to adhere to that last maxim after a decade of war in Vietnam provides a "cautionary lesson" for the war in Iraq.

Some foreign policy experts think that the commitment of a large, long-term troop presence in Iraq does little to spark action in a lethargic political reconciliation process in Iraq, the ultimate key to success there. They draw a very different parallel with Vietnam. "It does not provide an endgame, which puts us right back in the problem of Vietnam in trying to push an ally or a host nation to try and change," explained Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. "We are giving them the breathing space because of our large force numbers, but their belief is that because we have made such a large commitment, we are not going to leave, so they don't really have to change."

Hoffman said McCain is "right to invoke Vietnam, but he is drawing the wrong lesson ... People misapply history to fit their view of the world. This seems like another example."

So, what is 100 years, 10,000 years if we can declare victory at the end of it?

I have an idea. How about we change the meaning of the word 'victory' like the right has tried to change the word 'fascism' and has fuglied the word 'liberal'? We say victory means staying until ... oh... April 27th, 2008.

Then we hit the date, declare victory achieved, and leave.

Then those who need to can yell,"We've won!" We can have our parades for our soldiers, create a G.I. bill that supports our troops and restarts the economy, and begin rebuilding our country and our Constitution.

Ya think?

crossposted at Rants from the Rookery

The Iraq war

This will be George Bush's legacy: The Iraq quagmire, the Bush blunder, the unnecessary war, the war of choice, the attack on a sovereign nation that had not attacked us on 9/11/01. None of the multitudinous reasons .... excuses.... given for our being there have ever been found to be true.

The neocons told us this war was what they wanted long before Bush was president; while Clinton was president, they sent him a signed letter asking we take on Iraq. Many of us guessed that when Bush was given power, we would be at war with Iraq within two years. This projection was made without the fantastic excuse of 9/11.

9/11 didn't actually change anything except for our sense of superiority. We finally joined the rest of the world in coping with terrorism within our own borders. Our foreign policies had finally come home to roost.

So Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz finally got their war. It will be fast! And cheap! The oil will pay for everything! Saddam is bad! He mocked George Bush senior! His moustache is evil! The neocons were indifferent to anything but what they were about to get their hands on.

So the country literally came apart. Very much like what happened in Yugoslavia, old enmities rose up once the dictator was gone. Foreign insurgents flooded in, religious differences began to show, tribal loyalities became strong. Instead of fighting one enemy in one war, there were suddenly twenty wars with fifty different reasons going on. It became a civil war.

And Bush had deliberately opened the Pandora's box. Without a real plan. They thought Chalabi, who had been groomed to pop into place, could just slip into Hussein's spot. But somehow the people didn't want him. Several 'leaders' later, no one is able to unify the factions that now control the country, or even get any kind of agreement between the sockpuppet politicians to vote together. When Bush complains that the Iraqis aren't doing enough to get the government going, the response is, "What Iraqi government?" Many of the pseudo politicians that were voted in with purple fingers are actually out of the country. If the people do not support the government, there is no government. I guess that's a hard concept for George.

So now we have been there five years. What have we accomplished? What have we done? We have a tenuous peace with al-Sadr who has agreed to a ceasefire. We have teamed up with the very people who were shooting at our soldiers just a few months ago to help them shoot at the al-Qaeda... who were not in Iraq until we attacked. We are balancing a dangerous tightrope between the Saudi-supported Sunni and the Iranian-supported Shiite, trying to prevent Iran from taking over a huge section of Iraq. Saudi Arabia is sending insurgents and an immense amount of money into Iraq to fight .... our soldiers, yet we are supportive of the Saudi government and have offered them a huge arms deal. More and more tangled loyalities confuse the issue. There is no one 'bad guy' to defeat. I haven't even mentioned the Kurds and Turkey.

So. How do we 'win' this fight? How do we win this war? How do we extricate ourselves from this quagmire?

John McCain says we will be there for hundreds of years.

Both Democratic candidates say we will leave.

As we ponder this conundrum, bombs are going off and soldiers and civilians are dying. All because of Bush.

This will be his enduring legacy.

The Iraq war.