Sherry Chandler

Patience, again

Peter Galbraith in Salon explains why there’s all this talk of impatience in the American people:

The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the president nor the war’s intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.

The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning — a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes — but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, “The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America.”

Tellingly, the Iraq war’s intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign the blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people. In the Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, “Those who believe the war is already lost — call it the Clinton-Lugar axis — are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home.” Lugar provoked Donnelly’s anger by noting that the American people had lost confidence in Bush’s Iraq strategy as demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This “blame the American people” approach has, through repetition, almost become the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of public support and not to 15 years of military failure.)

Read this whole article. You’ll have to sit through a short commercial if you’re not a Salon subscriber, but it’s worth it. It will explain much of what’s going on in Iraq now.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.