June 3, 2007
The Rock, Paper (no need for those scissors) style of debate
It seems these days if you ask a supporter of the war in Iraq to define victory or explain the objectives of our occupation force the response you get has nothing to do with the questions asked. Usually they want to come back with a comment about how the American people wont accept defeat or everyone’s favorite summer movie tagline, “they’ll follow us home…”
Neither of those responses has anything to do with the question of how we seek to resolve the conflict or just what the victory the American people can’t do without is made of, and that’s the big problem with the debate over the state of the war.
Supporters want to see this as a victory or defeat situation and refuse to deal with it as the multi-layered situation where there will be no glorious conclusion that wraps everything up in a neat little package. So, instead of addressing a complex question in an equally complex manner they choose to answer the question they’d prefer to be asked, and they answer with inaccurate platitudes simple enough for the Wiggles crowd.
It’s really turned this debate into the dumbest game of Rock, Paper, Scissors ever played. Supporters of the war are steadfast in their desire to throw rock every single time. I guess they figure all those rocks will pile up, or maybe one will be the magic rock, or maybe they’re just buying time while they look around for that real rock to throw like the commercial with the guy who bashes his friend’s head with a rock to win a cheap, flavorless beer.
Of course every time they throw rock, it just gets covered by paper right off and thus is somehow defeated. (I’ve never understood this key principle in the circular reasoning of Rock, Paper, Scissors, but some things you just have to take on faith.) So after each defeat there’s a cry of, “best two out of three, best three out of five, best four of seven…” As long as the discussion stays with off-target, gift-wrapped rocks and repetitive strategies employing force to quell a mixture of centuries-old ethnic conflict and opportunistic violence against Americans, nothing will change or end.
Those against the war need to stop accepting unanswered questions in such an important debate. If they say we can’t accept defeat, explain that leaving Iraq is not accepting defeat, and pulling a majority of our troops out does not mean we abandon the country to become a terrorist training ground as it wasn’t under Saddam Hussein. If they go for the scare with the follow us home crap, we need to ask them why they think they can’t defend our country because we’ve got plenty of evidence that al Qaida’s always wanted to attack here again and really only went to Iraq because we’re easy targets there.
Then we need to stop giving them extra chances to throw rock. If they’ve lost 57 out of 113, I think it’s time for us to call it a game and move on to some good old fashioned thumb wars.