Foresight: When You Know Right Is Wrong

What TBogg said last week.

Like Viet Nam, we are losing in Iraq. That's a fact. You cannot beat an insurgency that seems to have an unlimited amount of "martyrs" willing to walk into the public square and blow themselves up taking twenty or so citizens with them. The American military is bunkered into the Green Zone behind blast-proof walls and razor wire because; if they walk out into the streets...they're going to die. It's Fort Apache the Bronx. Those who are supposed to be in control of the streets are the Iraqi policemen, but if they are in control, then why do they have to wear masks? Because, if they don't the insurgents will come to their houses and kill them. Iraq is probably the only country in the world whose entire police force is in the Witness Protection Program.

With every American death, with every request for more billions for Iraq, the American public that initially supported the war starts to edge away from it as if it smells like last weeks garbage. Military recruiters are currently doing everything short of shanghaiing high school kids and they still can't meet their recruitment goals. Soldiers are being kept in Iraq for too long. We are running out of money, soldiers, patience, and more importantly, the will to fight in Iraq.

Which is exactly what happened in Viet Nam.

So when we finally bow down to public opinion and admit defeat (only we won't admit defeat...we'll just call it a tie) and pull out of Iraq, and the power vacuum that ensues results in tribal warfare and more death and destruction, who do you think the rightwing echo chamber is going to blame? Not the neo-cons who sent us on this fools errand. Not the generals who were whistling past the graveyard when they should have been telling Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to fuck off. Not the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who waved their little flags and their well-thumbed copies of Sun Tzu and pointed out that it looked a hell of a lot easier on the Risk board.

No. They're going to blame us because we didn't wear little flag lapel pins and slap yellow ribbon magnetic stickers on our SUV's and we subverted the cause of democracy in the Middle East and that's why 1600 and counting American soldiers are dead, and the blood of every Iraqi killed in the wake of our leaving will be on our hands.

Grim but correct, alas.

Thanks to the Poor Man for the link.