EFFin’ Unsound

– posted by thehim 

Eric Earling continues to be adorable:

It is moderately disturbing that even before potential new policy in Iraq is formally announced, there is already a catchy yet not quite accurate phrase in wide circulation to describe it.

I agree.  Instead of “Double Down”, I think the more accurate phrase is “Double or Nothing” or maybe “Hail Mary”.

The news that President Bush may well support a temporary surge in US troops in Iraq is bound to create something darn close to the mother of all outcries from liberals and assorted corners of the media.

I guess since 8% of Americans support sending more troops to Iraq, liberals and assorted corners of the media make up the other 92%?

Let me offer some preemptive commentary if such a policy comes to fruition, since our local papers and the liberal blogs may well meet the news with no small amount of incredulous, spittle-filled denunciations.

Not to mention the military.

With many an “if,” this is a policy many conservatives can and will support.

It involves killing people and wasting money, and it accomplishes absolutely nothing.  What’s not to like?

Anyone following the Iraq debate closely in recent months knows a number of prominent conservatives (such as Rich Lowry at the National Review, Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard) have endorsed such a policy for a clear purpose: to smash the Mahdi Army, giving the Iraqi government and security forces a chance to solidify themselves, thus allowing us to begin a reasonable and appropriate draw down of US forces as a series of realistic benchmarks are met.

First of all, anybody closely following Iraq stopped listening to people like Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol a long time ago.  Second, the Mahdi Army numbers 60,000 and are dispersed throughout Baghdad and other Shiite cities and towns.  You can’t “smash” them.  They’re not a bug.  They’re a popular movement that will keep growing if Bush continues to follow the advice of idiots like Lowry and Kristol about how to pacify Iraq.

Recent moves by the Bush administration in talks with non-Mahdi Shiites and assorted Sunni powers that be seems for the broader purpose of shoring of support for the current government, which will need all it can get if a serious move on the militias is made.

It will need an exit strategy.

There are many nuances to Iraq policy and potential related changes, and many specific points that need to be examined if one is to understand the reasoning in full.

Oh, do tell, Mr. Earling.  Share your wisdom with the masses.

Such a story is nearly impossible to cover well on TV, and hardly much better in typical daily newspaper.

Too many facts get through when you use those things.

Nevertheless, one can expect to be inundated with news coverage should such a policy be announced.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the President could conduct this war in silence?  If it wasn’t for all this news coverage, he’d be able to concentrate, dammit!

Earplugs may be necessary to protect oneself against the volume of howls from opposition aghast that the President would even consider acting like a Chief Executive instead of simply following our modern version of the national plebiscite, opinion polls.

C’mon people!  It’s not like the President has ever given us any reason to question his judgement when it comes to waging war. 

Let me say one thing in advance of criticism that will no doubt be well covered if the President makes such a choice. The President is not elected to follow polls.

But he is elected to deal with reality.

He is not elected to function solely as an arm of popular opinion.

But he is elected to accomplish things.

He swears an Oath of Office to preserve and protect the Constitution, not to preserve and protect Gallup.

Can you please let us know if he has any plans to actually preserve and protect the Constitution?  I haven’t seen much of that in the past 6 years.

Wartime leaders have had to make unpopular decisions throughout history; that’s the reality of warfare and human nature.

No one cares that Bush is making decisions that are unpopular.  We care that he’s making decisions that are mistakes.  If a President makes a decision that’s unpopular, but eventually works, he will be vindicated.  But Bush’s track record has been the opposite.  The invasion of Iraq was a popular decision that turned out to be an utter disaster.  But instead of learning from it, he continues to believe that he made the right decision and bases his future decisions on this faulty premise.  If this doesn’t scare you, there’s a problem.

Sometimes those decisions work out, sometimes they don’t. Often history is the only true judge accordingly.

I’m sorry, but anyone who still believes that one day, Bush is going to be looked at as some kind of visionary genius for what he unleashed in Iraq, is too stupid for words. 

If a troop surge is at least in part for the purpose of taking it to the Mahdi Army then good. Some objectors will screech “warmongers!” and other such terms.

Some objectors will screech “warmongers!”, but other objectors will politely explain - for the millionth time - that trying to using military brute force to pacify Iraq and root out political elements that oppose our presence is never going to work.  It’s not a moral issue here, or a sign of weakness, to oppose an escalation.  It’s purely a matter of pragmatism to assess the situation as it is and conclude that we have no good options for quelling the violence there. 

They will quaintly relive their halcyon days of Vietnam-era protest, regrettably oblivious, as many Americans are, that while such a move will be not without cost for either side it will be far from the violent scope of most armed conflict in our nation’s past.

So that’s the bar?  Shouldn’t we care not just about how much relative damage in human life is done by our military endeavors and actually care about what gets accomplished?  Or is simply being at war what we’re trying to accomplish?  If not, forgive me for being snide when you cheerlead absurd, unrealistic ideas and then accuse those who disagree with them of being weak-willed.

Thus is the legacy of the comparatively sterile battles of the first Gulf War, and the Second as well during “traditional” hostilities. We expect war to be tidy, to go as planned, to fit nicely onto a TV screen.

Mostly, we want it to go as planned.  When we’re told that we’re overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s government, uncovering hidden caches of WMD’s, and creating a pro-Western democracy in Iraq, we’re not happy with the outcome of a civil war that threatens to become a regional conflagration with our military being stuck defending a pro-Iranian government while Iran’s leader just hosted a conference questioning the Holocaust.  Especially when there were never any fucking WMD’s in the first place.

Tell that to the Greatest Generation.

Here’s an idea.  Instead of worshipping the Greatest Generation, let’s start acting like them and stand up for the values that America has always stood for, like basic human rights and the rule of law.  That’s how they became the Greatest Generation, not simply because they won a war.

No peoples should welcome war, but America’s stomach for it in defense of her interest is alarmingly low.

Well, when you figure out a way to convince more Americans to sign up and die for the President’s inability to be serious about what’s happening in Iraq, let us know.  For now, America doesn’t have the stomach for more war in that country because it’s been giving us explosive diarrhea for the past three years.

If President Bush does indeed increase troop strength temporarily, for the right reasons, then conservatives will likely support it as the best of a set of unappealing options.

Because anyone who still thinks that the way we’ve waged war over there is in line with conservative principles will support just about anything Bush does.

Even some Democrats will have the courage to agree.

Yeah, the idiot who thinks that al-Qaeda is a Shi’ite group.  Thanks Nancy.

And in the end, it will remind all of us that this is one President who believes more in living up to the words and spirit of his Oath of Office than riding a feel-good wave of popular approval. That’s not such a bad thing.

It’s truly amazing to see a relatively intelligent person like Eric Earling say stuff like this.  It makes you appreciate how entrenched the myth is that only hawkish Republicans are serious about foreign policy.  There is no dispute at this point that the invasion of Iraq will be seen as one of the gravest foreign policy mistakes in this nation’s history and that the clueless hippies who were warning of the consequences in 2002-2003 were absolutely prescient in their dire predictions.  The fact that large numbers of fellow conservatives and right-leaning foreign policy experts are now desperately trying to sound the alarms still means nothing to Earling because, in his mind, Bush sees something that no one else sees.  He has a vision that will overpower all the bad things that are happening as soon as some magical event involving guns and bad people dying transpires.  And then Bush is a genius. 

I’m sorry, but the only appropriate word for this is delusion. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 5:22 pm and is filed under TheHim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.