December 10, 2006
The inability to admit defeat, doesn’t actually negate defeat
It all comes down to a fear of defeat and an irrational sense of what that might mean. Just days after Our Fine President begrudgingly received the Iraq Study Group’s report and spoke of changing his strategy, his staff is now floating balloons about cherry picking a few choice recommendations and then ignoring the report for the most part.
Gee, that seems an awful lot like the way these guys treated the 9/11 Commission Report a few years ago. This time around it seems like they don’t want to follow the recommendations because some of them will make it look like we lost in Iraq. Now members of the Study Group are insisting that “We’re not going to win this war militarily; we’re going to win it politically,” but indications from the administration is that they’re upset the plan doesn’t mention victory as the main outcome and think some of its strategies are impossible.
Now, I’m no expert in running a war, international politics or growing democracies, but I think we can all agree that no one working for this administration has much of a right to claim expertise in any of those areas either. Every plan they’ve had for this war has not gone quite right. Sure they built a democracy in Iraq, but a chaotic land of sectarian violence is not a democracy just because everyone can show off a finger stained with ink from the voting booth. This democratically elected government is unable to maintain the peace on the streets or enforce basic law and order, thus preventing it from living up to its name in the most basic tasks of governance.
At the outset of our Iraqi adventure we were told the war was needed because Saddam Hussein was a bad man, who was busy building dangerous weapons and hanging out with our terrorist enemies. Our Fine President stood up and talked about how bringing the gifts of democracy and his favorite word “freedom” to these people would magically transform their land into a shining beacon upon the region bringing peace and the American way of life to all the downtrodden and oppressed people of the Middle East.
If those were our stated goals, at least partial failure is guaranteed. Sure Hussein was a bad man and we sure got him good, but we failed because we were wrong about his weapons and friends. It seems no one liked him and he wasn’t busy building new toys. In the eyes of the world, we’re already failures because of our decision to follow the weak intelligence information leading to those conclusions.
We did bring democracy to the land as they’ve had several elections that were at least as fair and orderly as our own. Score that one up as a victory for Our Fine President’s plan. Of course his beacon seems to be shining its light on Iraqis loving their freedom so much they feel OK killing each other in the streets instead of on a glorious new society with massive oil revenues that help them pay back their new American friends. Oh yeah, weren’t we once told that this was makes sense because it can pay for itself?
So now after a group looks into things, calls for a clear direction to end a worsening occupation and asks the government to be honest about its management of the war, the people who’ve been getting everything wrong for the last half-decade get right to the poo-pooing. By now it’s no surprise that after such profound lack of success they still retain the hubris to denigrate the ideas of other because they don’t think their outcome will be positive and successful enough.
It’s too bad that because of the war in Iraq the U.S. has lost a great deal of standing in the world and seen our military might and principled stances weakened, but that’s what happens when you fight a war to appease the vanity of the warmakers. We got Hussein and there’s really nothing much more for us to do there. Sure we shouldn’t abandon the current leaders we’ve helped come to power over there, but our plan in Iraq now needs to focus on how we can extract our military from Iraqi soil without causing much more damage.
The Iraq Study Group’s report is a plan to do just that. It might not be the victory Our Fine President promised all of us, but hey who still expects the guy to deliver on all his boasting these days. We’ve let this guy have his chance to do things his way, I know he’s still President and all, but it’d be nice if he’d listen to the will of the people he was elected to govern and try someone else’s plan for once.