09 Oct 06 Stop the Insanity!

The Insanity of ‘Staying the Course’ in Iraq
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 9, 2006.

The idea that Iraq will spiral out of control if U.S. forces withdraw has been hammered home since the beginning of the occupation by the wars supporters, but while it’s a danger, it is also anything but the certainty that’s become part of the conventional wisdom. Seventy percent of Iraqis have confidence that their police force can maintain order.

The hawks who brought us this war have gone through an exquisite set of intellectual gymnastics to produce new justifications for why we have to stay the course. The latest is that pulling out of Iraq will “embolden” the terrorists. Vice President Cheney said recently that a withdrawal at this point would only “validate the al Qaeda strategy and invite even more terrorist attacks.” The obvious flaw in that argument is that whatever “emboldening” might or might not occur has already happened; before the invasion, the secretary of defense of the most powerful country the world has ever known predicted that the war “could last six days, six weeks” but doubted it would last six months. Yet three and a half years later, a few thousand Iraqi insurgents with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades have kept the leviathan pinned down, and there’s no sign that they’re anywhere close to their “last legs.” They’ve isolated the United States from its allies, stymied U.S. foreign policy from Singapore to the Sudan and halted Bush’s ambitions to “reform” the Middle East. The lesson has already been learned, as evidenced by the Taliban’s adoption of many of the Iraqi insurgents’ tactics in Afghanistan

Click title for full article @ AlterNet

The rest of this article is peppered with links that support most of the points Holland raises. A really good read that further hammers home how ridiculous this ‘Stay the Course’ rhetoric is.

I think more than anything the linear thinking coming from the administration demonstrates their incredible hubris in this situation. Can it really be argued that they are putting what is best for America, democracy in Iraq and ‘The War on Terror (TWAT) above what is best in assuring the Republican legacy? If they were honestly concerned more about the people than their reputation then I would think they could concede a little bit of defeat or admission of error and aim to correct it rather than this ‘We are never wrong and we must stay-the-course regardless of all of the facts pointing toward the course not working.’

This bit from Jon Stewart the other night, while very funny, did actually strike home a good point. Bush obviously thinks that we the people should but out of the administration’s business and just let them “do their job,” whatever that job may be. Honestly, George “Dubya” Bush of all people thinks you are too stupid to fully understand his job and you should just go about your business.

I don’t think anyone in the administration are truly bad people, I just don’t think they know what they are doing. Their failure to admit this failure will prevent them from working toward a viable solution in both Iraq and America as a whole.

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