You've got to hand it to the administration, neither policy makers nor their mouthpiece president seem exhibit any shame. To get out there every day and blatantly rewrite history with a straight face takes big-time talent.
Seriously. Imagine you're the CEO of a major biotech company and you've convinced your board to let you go ahead with a new pesticide that conventional wisdom considers dangerous and ill-advised. Predictably, the spray doesn't seem to be working in the field as well as your handlers claimed it would Not only does the pesticide kill those plants supposedly under its care, but airborne fumes seem to have spawned a race of deadly mutant bees.
The bad press is dragging the company down and the board is furious. Not to worry though, because you're able to convince them that the reports are imbalanced, that your enemies have conspired to show only the bad news from the spray while neglecting to point out the tremendous success that you swear it's having elsewhere. In fact, since you commandeered all the resources of the company to pursue keeping the spray on the market, you have been making demonstrable gains. The dumbfounded board started to call your bluff, but got distracted by news of a pop star's pregnancy and decided to adjourn for the summer.
Your respite only lasted so long. By the time the next meeting rolled around, what was already a hefty population of mutant bees has now ballooned into a global pandemic. Since no young white girl was kidnapped that week, the board had it's full media attention on your mess. So you do the only logical thing you can do - you tell them that, even though it may take 20 years, the spray is going to work. Then you tell them that if only we had used the spray in Vietnam we would have won the war.
Yes, you say that. You say that with a completely straight face.
And then you say it again.
The implication is obvious - the Democrats are going to pull out of Iraq and will therefore be responsible for all the deaths that will likely occur without a US military presence. And how can Democrats be so heartless as to kill all those innocent people?
I think BooMan said it best:
I don't think the Republicans understand that people who have been watching the war in Iraq for the last four years have been internalizing their grief all along...preparing for the day when all hell breaks loose. The time is long since past when rational people could expect a remission of the metastasis. One last blast of radiation is not, and has not, solved the problem.
Hell, everyone knows that the only way to win a war is to never start one. This was not World War II. Iraq was never a just war and we are not the good guys.
We made a horrible, planet-altering mess in the backyard of our brothers and sisters and people - real people - are dying every day because of it.
And bloody stalemates don't just end in five or ten of fifty years, they go on and on until everyone is dead. The only way to end it is to break down the status quo. And in this case, we are the status quo.
Iraq's body count this year may double 2006 numbers as has Iraq's prison population. Meanwhile, since the surge, US deaths are also on the rise and millions of more Iraqi's have been displaced from their homes. Millions.
And in the end, the entire analogy is a big lie anyway. As Matthew Rothschild points out:
"The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens," he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. By the way, he's counting the victims of the Khmer Rouge, who came to power only after the U.S. ruined Cambodia.
And he's not counting the three million people the U.S. killed in Southeast Asia during that war.
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