Americans are torn between two irreconcilable positions on the Iraq war. Some want the war to be a success - variously defined - and some want the war to be over. Conservatives are basically, but not exclusively, in the "success" camp. Liberals (and those further to the left) are basically, but not exclusively, the "over" party. And many people are suffering profound cognitive dissonance by believing these two positions can be held simultaneously. The motives driving these positions range from the purely patriotic to the coldly realistic to the cravenly political or psychologically perfervid. Parsing motives is exhausting and pointless, but one fact remains: "End it now" and "win it eventually" cannot be reconciled.
With Wednesday night's speech, President Bush made it clear that he will settle for nothing less than winning. He may be deluding himself, but he at least has done the nation the courtesy of stating his position, despite an antagonistic political establishment and a hostile public. What's maddening is that the Democratic leadership cannot, or will not, clearly tell the American people whether they are the party of "end it" or "win it."
... Here we have a president forthrightly trying to win a war, and the opposition - which not long ago favored increasing troops when Bush was against that - won't say what it wants. This is flatly immoral. If you believe the war can't be won and there's nothing to be gained by staying, then, to paraphrase Sen. John Kerry, you're asking more men to die for a mistake. You should demand withdrawal. But that might cost votes, so they opt for nonbinding symbolic votes.
The flaw, here, of course, is suggesting that being honest about your goals somehow contributes to those goals being particularly achievable or problem-free. While praising Bush's directness, Goldberg attempts to perform a subtle slight-of-hand, hoping that people won't realize that the effectiveness of a strategy has nothing to do with how straight-forward you are about it. Yes, politics would be much nicer if people would actually fess up to their positions and not worry about votes (Lincoln Chafee comes to mind), but get real, Jonah- you're conflating apples and oranges, and I'm not drinking that smoothie.
Wednesday, Bush finally acknowledged what Americans already knew: The war has not gone well. But he also acknowledged what few Democrats are willing to admit: If we leave - i.e. lose - it will be a disaster, a geo-strategic calamity for America and possibly a genocidal one for the Iraqis. One moral argument against the Iraq war in 2003 was that it would create an enormous humanitarian crisis in the form of refugees spilling over the borders, which in turn would destabilize the region. That didn't happen. But it would be the most likely result of a U.S. withdrawal now. Yet that's a risk the antiwar crowd is suddenly willing to take.
No, Jonah, he question is to what degree will there be a disaster either way- are we going to stay there for 20 years to try to avoid a civil war? We're going to have to leave eventually, and unless there's some dramatic change in Iraq, the result will be a bloodbath. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see what we could possibly do within the next five years (and that's being super-generous; I doubt that even most Republicans will support us being there that long) that is going to affect this change. Killing them doesn't work, and telling them to stop killing each other doesn't work either- so what are we going to accomplish by staying? Or is the plan to kill or maim enough of the country so that they can't fight effectively? Because I've heard of cases where people with no arms learned to shoot with their feet or mouths- where there's a will, you know.
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