3,000

The saddest thing about the 3,000th American death in Iraq is that unlike the first batch of casualties, people getting killed or maimed in Iraq these days are really doing so in the course of a bad faith military option. Iraq Year One was a fiasco, but it was a genuine mistake. Since then, and certainly these days, we're passed all that. Nobody genuinely believes that they (or anyone else) has an Iraq policy that offers any kind of reasonable prospects for success. So young men and women are out there killing and dying not because the people giving them their orders really think those orders are a good idea. Instead, they need to stay in Iraq, need to keep killing and keep dying, because the idea of admitting failure is too much for some people.

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Comments

Nobody genuinely believes that they (or anyone else) has an Iraq policy that offers any kind of reasonable prospects for success.

I might have to beg to differ, though it is a minor point. Whlie the clear majority of those talking about success are doing so because they perceive talking honestly about our failures to be political suicide, there really does seem to be a hardcore group of messianic believers that thinks we will eventually win because God himself commanded this one. Bill Kristol is a clear member of the former group; he's dishonest but he's not so foolish to believe that we're going to win. At this point, he's trying to figure out how to eventually claim some implausible notion of victory. The president, on the other hand, really strikes me as a believer. He really is that foolish. Certainly some of his more religious supporters fall into this category as well. It's no more honorable to be a genuine believer in the face of all evidence to the contrary, it just reflects a willful self-deception rather than an intentional deception only of others.

BTW, Happy New Year's to everyone. May 2007 be better than 2006 for everyone out there. As the Beatles suggested...I have to believe it's getting better, getting better all the time (can't get much worse)...

Posted by: jfaberuiuc on January 1, 2007 02:02 PM

"(can't get much worse)..."

Wanna bet?

Posted by: Farinata X on January 1, 2007 02:23 PM

"(can't get much worse)..."

Wanna bet?

I said much worse, not worse (actually, Paul McCartney said it, but...). Still, point taken. Call it the rule of Atrios: when Republicans are in power and your bet is due, take the under. Doesn't matter what you're betting on, just take the under.

Posted by: jfaberuiuc on January 1, 2007 02:37 PM

The saddest thing about every death in this war is that opposition to the war was marginalized as silly and naive. This war has progressed exactly as was expected by anyone who was paying attention. There's no separating parts of it out as less misbegotten than any other. I do, however, understand that impulse, especially among people who supported the war in the first place.

Posted by: eRobin on January 1, 2007 02:40 PM

The execution of Saddam would've provided the perfect opportunity to pack up & go home with dignity intact. It had perfect symmetry: the war began with an ultimatum for Saddam to step down, and the first volley was a direct strike aimed at killing him. Now, with that goal finally accomplished, there is nothing more to be done in Iraq, no sir.

Unfortunately, some irresponsible folks have spent the last three or so years equating withdrawal with defeat. If only they hadn't done so, we could be leaving tomorrow.

Posted by: Grumpy on January 1, 2007 02:57 PM

Right on Grumpy. Bush has consistently raised the stakes by saying that nothing short of absolute victory is acceptable. If he had any concept of foreign relations or was even able to look past the next election, he would have underplayed the goals.

Now the American public is being routinely blamed, even in the MSM, as not having the stomach for the war. In reality they don't have the stomach for being lied to about the war anymore and have reasonably judged that without a realistic convincing case for why we should stay there, we should leave.

Posted by: gregpstone on January 1, 2007 03:10 PM

One of the things i understand least about this war is how the people planning it, devoid of any obvious plan for victory, seem to have forgotten to plan to claim victory, even if it required lying to do so. Thus, the election of a government and the trial of Hussein were not used an excuse to leave, even though either would have originally been an option (a dishonest option, sure, but an option nonetheless). Instead, we have Bush standing in a grave of his own making, saying "A shovel, a shovel, my kingdom for a shovel"...

Posted by: jfaberuiuc on January 1, 2007 03:34 PM

Nobody genuinely believes that they (or anyone else) has an Iraq policy that offers any kind of reasonable prospects for success.

Of course some of us genuinely believe that.

Posted by: Al on January 1, 2007 03:51 PM

He means people who don't have their heads so far up their asses that they're human Klein bottles, Al. Leaves you out, doncha know.

Posted by: sglover on January 1, 2007 04:29 PM

Note that Al doesn't actually reveal his secret plan for winning the war, since that would apparently be too risible even for him.

Posted by: MQ on January 1, 2007 04:33 PM

Some are wondering why Bush et alia do not just find some excuse to declare "victory" and go home: "they lied us into war, why can't they lie us out?"

Bush never honestly stated why he wanted to invade Iraq, and some people are led to speculate about whether he's just revenging a father he evidently hates, or is "a true believer" in I don't know what, or is just a fool.

I look at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) stuff from the mid-1990's on (PNAC was a hangout for Cheney, Rumsfeld and others associated with Administration's Iraq policy), and I see a plan for permanent American bases in Iraq -- an extended occupation force a la that placed in Germany, Italy, Japan and Korea at mid-century. The idea was to extend and redeploy the forces of American Empire for a new century. The U.S. forces would be leverage to transform Iraq into an Arab ally of the U.S. and Israel, to do deepen American hegemony in the Persian Gulf oil region, intimidating Iran and Syria, etc.

The goal was a permanent American military presence. So, to leave is to lose -- quite literally.

To achieve the goal of permanent American military bases, the U.S. needed a weak and dependent Iraqi government, because a strong Iraqi government would ask the U.S. to leave. Unfortunately, the plan for a weak Iraqi government has backfired, as Iraqi society has disintegrated.

Because the goal is a permanent U.S. presence, many in the Bush Administration were slow to see the burgeoning chaos as a threat, because it seemed to them to just further justify the U.S. staying indefinitely.

In other words, Bush and his most ardent supporters do not share the goals of rational, decent people.

Attacking Bush for being incompetent or divorced from reality for not being better at achieving goals he does have, is really missing the target.

It has only recently become marginally unrealistic to expect the U.S. to be able to maintain a permanent military presence in Iraq. Until very recently, the chaos has simply reinforced the arguments of those who want that permanent presence. Those, who want it, are even now busily putting a privatization of Iraqi oil production into place!

The marginalization of those, who opposed the Iraq War from get-go, is really a continual marginalization of those, who oppose American Empire. The proponents of American Empire are in power, still, and it will take revolution to overthrow them.

Posted by: Bruce Wilder on January 1, 2007 04:45 PM

Attacking Bush for being incompetent or divorced from reality for not being better at achieving goals he NOT does have, is really missing the target.

oops

Posted by: Bruce Wilder on January 1, 2007 04:46 PM

Al, if you can provide details of an Iraq policy that offers success, please do. My son is an infantry paratrooper in Iraq and believe me, if anyone wants to know that success is really achievable and not some wishful fantasy, it would be those of us whose loved ones are putting their lives on the line every day. Or those who have already lost their lives.

But here is the very simple ground rule: Meaningless slogans and "I believe" statements from this administration don't count.

I don't give a rat's patoot what Bush believes. I want some reality, not his delusions.

It is, and continues to be, completely astonishing to me that we are fed pap that falls roughly into two broad categories, wishful thinking and marketeering, and that our alleged leaders are more agitated about our failure to obediently swallow their fetid pap than they are about their utter failure to establish and carry out sane, productive, useful foreign policy that contributes to the stability of the US and the world.

When we strip away all the blah blah words and self-important pronouncements, what's left? Diddly.

Posted by: Lynn H on January 1, 2007 05:13 PM

i've said this many times before, but it's a new year: matthew and those like him who are young and politically engaged are now learning what made elements of the anti-vietnam movement go crazy: by 1968 it was perfectly clear to anyone who cared to think about it that there was no "success" to be had in vietnam that US firepower could achieve, and yet the war continued, year after year after year after year after year after year after year (indeed, although the number of troops began to decline after 1968, nixon expanded the war in other ways, such as the invasion of cambodia that caused me to miss my beloved knicks seventh game win over the lakers - the willis reed game - so that i could attend a protest rally), because nixon and kissinger believed that anything else made us look like a "pitiful, helpless giant."

and with kissinger providing input into the new way forward....

as for the likes of al, notice how he never defines "success" or explains to us how us firepower can achieve it....

Posted by: howard on January 1, 2007 06:26 PM

as for the likes of al, notice how he never defines "success" or explains to us how us firepower can achieve it....

Of course, the folks on the left never define "failure" (which they say is inevitable) either. If you give me that, I can define success by reference, can't I?

Posted by: Al on January 2, 2007 01:51 AM

Jesus Christ, Al.

We can define "failure" as, you know, failing to achieve any of the stated strategic objectives of the war: neutralizing Iraq's WMD and its links to al-Qaeda, exporting liberal democracy to Iraq and thence to the rest of the region, and earning the gratitude of the Iraqi people.

Or we can define "failure" as killing many thousands of innocent people for no good reason, and making the world much more dangeorus in doing so.

If you don't think Iraq today is a "failure," you're even more delusional than I thought. Don't you have any shame at all?

Posted by: Shab al-Sham on January 2, 2007 03:56 AM

in addition to Shab's comments, al, no, it doesn't work like that. it's incumbent on those who want to continue to expend blood and treasure to explain what the hell we're getting for those costs. for the rest of us, it's simple: the blood and treasure has been spent to hang saddam and paint schools. it flunks every form of cost-benefit analysis known to humankind.

that's what failure looks like.

Posted by: howard on January 2, 2007 10:53 AM

Success is easy to define. Success would be a liberal-democratic Iraq capable of sustaining itself without outside help, accomplished in a reasonable amount of time, money, and blood. But if it had been announced in advance that the liberation of Iraq would cost 3000 American lives, ten times that maimed for life, and a trillion dollars, no one would have gone for it (to say nothing of the nearly million excess Iraqi deaths, which sadly wouldn't figure into most Americans' calculations). And yet with these costs, which, again, would have red-lighted the project if known in advance, the goal is nowhere in sight.

Shorter Al (along with all proponents of staying the course): staying = success, leaving = failure.

Posted by: kth on January 2, 2007 02:55 PM

Don't you have any shame at all?

No, Al has no shame at all.

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