So the Army is expecting that the politicians will fail and they will get stuck in Iraq for another four years. This little tidbit made the Sunday morning pundit circuit this week where politicians of both flavors said dumb politician things:
from a USAToday story by Dave Moniz:
- Sen. Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record), R-Neb., a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said again Sunday that it’s time to begin crafting an exit strategy. “We should start figuring out how we get out of there,” Hagel said on This Week on ABC. “I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur.”
- On Fox News Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record), a South Carolina Republican, counseled people to be patient. “The worst-case scenario is not staying four years; the worst-case scenario is leaving a dysfunctional, repressive government behind that becomes part of the problem in the war on terror and not the solution.”
From an AP report by Nedra Pickler:
- In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush said that as with past conflicts, the war on terror requires great sacrifice. He offered his condolences for the families of fallen soldiers.
- Hagel, who received two Purple Hearts and other military honors for his service in Vietnam, said Sunday the United States needs to develop a strategy to leave Iraq. He told ABC’s “This Week” that “stay the course” is not a policy. “By any standard, when you analyze 2 1/2 years in Iraq … we’re not winning,” he said.
First, everyone remember that Chuck Hagel is thinking about running for President in 2008, mmmkay?
Now lets look at these four cuts. I was born in 1972, and that means I don’t really give a damn about old festering wounds from Viet Nam era domestic politics, I’m not psychically scarred by Nixon or Woodstock or Kent State or from living in a commune or from the gooks in the wire. So when I hear tired old Hippy-era rhetoric like “exit strategy” I start to treat whomever is saying it like I treated my parents when they were trying to tell me that I couldn’t do something simply because they were the parents and I was the kid. Granted, this rhetoric is actually in the article, not the quotation from Hagel, so I did listen a little longer, and what he said was the now standard left-leaning conservative mantra that being in Iraq is making people in the Islamic and Arab worlds mad at us.
Newsflash, Chuck: Supporting Israel is making the Islamic and Arab worlds mad at us, stationing thousands of non-Arab, non-Muslim troops in the Holy Land is making them mad at us, and propping up undemocratic totalitarian monarchs and dictators in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, UAE, and Bahrain makes the mad at us; invading and occupying Iraq with incompetence is just making them more mad.
So in response the right-leaning conservatives comes from “a South Carolina Republican,” which by itself is a ridiculous bit of writing, but hey, one thing at a time. Lindsey Graham (the SCR in question) says that the worst case scenario is to leave a “dysfunctional, repressive government” behind in the sake of our pull-out. Does that mean a functional, repressive government is ok? More to the point, isn’t that exactly what we started out with – a repressive government that was high on the ‘states that sponsor terror’ list? Doesn’t that make it a push, minus the 1600 American troops, and 20,000-ish Iraqi civilians, the foreign contractors, the Saddam-era Iraqi troops, and the members of non-governmental organizations killed, plus the tens of thousands wounded and maimed, as a result of the invasion, regime change, occupation, and insurrection since the spring of 2003, launched by a government that was either too incompetent to read the intelligence reports, or actively lied to the Nation and the world in order to justify it’s act of vengeance and imperial aspirations? Maybe not.
My point is that it can’t get any worse than it is now if the worst thing that happens is a civil war that divides Iraq into three regions, on which is annexed by Iran, one that becomes Kurdistan, and one that gets absorbed by Syria and one or more of those new nations become state sponsors of terrorism, members of OPEC, and interested in pursuing nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. We’ve already been bloodied, we aren’t likely to maintain the political will to fight with gas hovering around $3.00 a gallon at the pump, and the All-Volunteer Military becomes a conscription force of stop-lossed National Guardsmen and Reservists who signed up to do two weekends a month for the G.I. Bill and beer money.
Which brings us to the reminders of the need for great sacrifices in the war on terror, said by a guy who is on a five week, all-expense paid vacation at a dude ranch and the exclusive North Idaho destination the Tamarack Resort, aka, the red-state millionaire’s club, where no mealy-mouthed, left-leaning conservatives are allowed to gather and cast shadows of guilt over the real business of recreating.
I don’t consider it a sacrifice when I have to stand in like for a pat-down search to get on the subway or the airplane; I consider it a theft. I don’t consider it a sacrifice when I end the news seeing the pictures taken in recruit training of kids who died for something that i can’t explain; I consider it a murder. A sacrifice, in this context is not “the act of slaughtering an animal or person as an offering to God,” though sometimes it seems that is precisely what is meant when it is evoked. If this were a real war – and by that I mean a war with clear objectives and a finite goal, authorized and declared by the House of Representatives in accordance to the Constitution – sacrifice would mean “the act of giving up something valued for the sake of something important or worthy.” But the thing is, we don’t fight real wars anymore, and so the notion that the rest of us need to sacrifice while the Federal Army is in the field under fire doesn’t really hit home, because without a real war, there isn’t anything important or worthy about the slaughter on the battlefield except getting home alive.
Which brings us back to Mr. Hagel. When you haven’t got a Declaration of War, you cannot win or lose. Yes that is a bit of a hard-headed tautological argument, but it’s true nonetheless. We aren’t in a War, we are in a war, and no one wins wars because, by design, they have no winners. Undeclared wars are the geopolitical equivalent of the card player with a losing hand flipping the table over and starting a brawl. Undeclared wars are the misdirection of a magician and invariably there is a hidden agenda steering the ship and setting the policy. If Mr. Hagel, or any other left-leaning conservative, wants to win an election in 2006 or 2008, focusing the rhetorical arsenal on that truth will be of more use than pandering to the special interests of the left end of the spectrum.