Signing On
by digby
So the generals have done the big el-foldo and are going along with the McCain escalation plan. (I’m sure we’ll be hearing from these profiles in courage when they whisper in the ears of the media that they were only following orders.)
K-Drum says what I think a lot of us are reluctantly thinking:
Still, honesty compels me to say that I’m glad this is going to happen. I know this makes me a bad person with no concern for human life etc. etc. (feel free to expand on this sentiment in comments), but at some point we have to come to a conclusion on this stuff. Conservatives long ago convinced themselves against all evidence that we could have won in Vietnam if we’d only added more troops or used more napalm or nuked Hanoi or whatever, and they’re going to do the same thing in Iraq unless we allow them to play this out the way they want. If they don’t get to play the game their way, they’ll spend the next couple of decades trying to persuade the American public that there was nothing wrong with the idea of invading Iraq at all. We just never put the necessary resources into it.
Well, screw that. There’s nothing we can do to stop them anyway, so give ’em the resources they want. Let ’em fight the war the way they want. If it works — and after all, stranger things have happened — then I’ll eat some crow. But if it doesn’t, there’s a chance that the country will actually learn something from this.
I wish it were otherwise. But it isn’t.
There is no chance this is going to work, so I do not hold out even the smallest hope that this could be worthwhile in literal terms. It is purely to save face for George Bush. The American involvement in this war is over — they’re just delaying the inevitable until he can crawl back to Crawford and dump the whole disater in the next guy’s lap.
As for the long term, it doesn’t matter how spectacularly they fail, they will never admit it. We would have won “if only” no matter what actually happens. If only we’d put in more troops earlier, or more troops now, or reinstituted the draft or dropped some daisy cutters or whatever. These people live in a fantasy world in which they are always right but others are continuously conspiring to rob them of whatever they really need to prove it. In the long run, they will insist that the war could have been won if only the wimps hadn’t lost their nerve. And they will persuade a fair number of people that this was true — Americans don’t like losers and don’t like to think of themselves as losers. The paranoid strain will be happy to re-argue, re-litigate and re-write history down the road to say that America was betrayed from within. It’s what they do.
There is some short term political gains to be had, however sick it is to think in these terms. In the long run they will create their own myth but in the short term, they are going to have to deal with the reality that is going to continue to appear on people’s televisions every night. And that will rebound to St. John McCain and any other Republicans who jump on this bandwagon as it hurls over the cliff.
This is McCain’s plan. He’s been clamouring for more troops for a long time and he specifically says today that 20,000 to 35,000 will do the trick. He’s now going to have to get into those John Kerry style explanations whenever it comes up (“I was for more troops before others were for more troops and it would have worked if only they’d done it earlier but I thought that it was worth sending in more anyway and in fact we need more troops even now.”) There’s no pithy sound bite to explain why he still thought sending in more troops after the war was already lost would be a good idea.
So, there’s a very, very thin silver lining. Other than that, this is a disastrous failure on top of a disastrous failure and the military, which took great pride in learning the lessons of Vietnam, is once again playing the part of political pawn. Every American who dies from this point forward, dies for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s vanity.
Update: Haha. As usual, Atrios got there first.
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