I wish the president had paid more attention to the history of Iraq before we had gotten in there. The idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is just plain wrong.
- Gov. Howard Dean
Oh, there’s pessimists, you know, and politicians who try to score points. Our troops need to know that the American people stand with them, and we have a strategy for victory.
- Our Glorious Leader
I suppose it’s easy to be optimistic when someone else’s loved one is doing the fighting and dying. And I suppose that, strictly speaking, there has been progress made in Iraq. Is that progress worth the cost in American lives? The answer to that question depends on which side of the political fence you happen to fall on. What should be evident at this point in time, though, is that Our Glorious Leader’s “strategy for victory” represents little more than the triumph of propaganda and talking points.
That the messenger is Howard Dean is both fortunate and unfortunate. It’s unfortunate in the sense that Republicans have successfully painted him as a rhetorical bomb-thrower, an unbalanced bleeding-heart Liberal completely out of touch with political reality. Of course, Republicans have no weapons in their arsenal save for insults and character assassination. It’s not as if they can argue that victory is nigh. So, when you have a convenient foil like Howard Dean as the messenger, why not just hoist him on his own petard?
As you might imagine, Republicans are not about to let Dean off easily. Indeed, GOP Charman Ken Mehlman is eagerly reciting their “loose lips sink ships” mantra: “outrageous prediction sends the wrong message to our troops, the enemy, and the Iraqi people just 10 days before historic elections.” Yes, apparently speaking truth to power sends the wrong message to a budding democracy. You certainly don’t want people to think that living in a democracy means being able to think for yourself and speak your mind, eh?
The problem is, Republican bleatings aside, is that Dean is right. One doesn’t even have to look far to learn the lessons of history. Those of us who came of age during Vietnam can remember the promises of victory that ultimately went unfulfilled…at the cost of more than 50,000 American lives. Must we now sit through a repeat of the same war?
This is not about being a defeatist or “sending the wrong message” to our “enemies” and our troops. It’s about admitting the reality that Bush in Iraq is the Second Coming of Nixon in Vietnam. It’s about owning up to the reality that the “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” is merely so much propanda and warmed-over talking points.
But the “can’t win” phrase is out of the box. It’s much like Rep. John Murtha’s call for the United States to “immediately redeploy” — there’s no going back. We can’t win is now a permanent part of the debate on Iraq.
Another significant but totally overlooked voice in the discussion on Iraq — and one who can’t be accused of “political rhetoric” — is that of Major Isaiah Wilson, who got the assignment of serving as the U.S. Army’s official historian of Gulf War II, Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). According to Wilson’s account, the United States effectively lost its dominance shortly after it invaded Iraq; another way of saying can’t win.
Wilson concluded in a presentation obtained by the Washington Post in December 2004, that three months after the invasion of Iraq, “U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative … gained over an off-balanced enemy. The United States, its Army and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since.”
Wilson added that the people responsible for planning the war suffered from “stunted learning and a reluctance to adapt.”
Wilson, who is a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and 2005 regional finalist White House Fellow, also concluded that the United States was “perhaps in peril of losing the ‘war,’ even after supposedly winning it.”
Of course, since this opinion was not welcome in the Bush White House and was clearly inconvenient, it was completely ignored. That Wilson’s observations haved proven surprisingly prescient should come as no surprise to any reasonable observer.
How many more Americans will have to die before we WAKE UP AND SMELL THE CAT LITTER? How many more parents will loses sons? How many more wives will bury there husbands? How many more children will be forced to grow up without a father? All because Our Glorious Leader insisted on “staying the course” because he refused to admit to the reality that the war he created in Iraq is a complete clusterf—k?
