Don Quixote is visibly crazy to most people. He believes ordinary inns to be enchanted castles, and their peasant girls to be beautiful princesses. He mistakes windmills for oppressive giants sent by evil enchanters. He imagines a neighboring peasant to be Dulcinea del Toboso, the beautiful maiden to whom he has pledged love and fidelity. - from the Wikipedia entry on Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes' legendary knight errant
If Cervantes wrote his epic tale today, he could very easily find inspiration for his titular hero in the Congressional Republicans who yesterday exerted themselves with righteous indignation over Rep. John Murtha's call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Like Quixote, they are divorced from reality, are experiencing delusions of grandeur, and imagine themselves the only ones capable of fighting the evil that plagues the realm.
I've already written about the combination of delusion and hubris exhibited by a career politician with no military record accusing a 37-year veteran of the Marine Corps of cowardice.
(Much, much more after the jump...)
But I've just read
the transcript of a press conference arranged hastily yesterday by a group of Republican windmill-tilters who moaned and wailed and promised that Iraq would be an oasis of democracy, a veritable land of milk and honey, if only cowards like Murtha would get out of the way and allow them to continue the pursuit of their Dulcinea - a free and democratic Iraq made peaceful through means of
a brutal occupation.
Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY):
Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, as well as Abu Musab Zarqawi, have made it quite clear in their internal propaganda that they cannot win unless they can drive the Americans out. And they know that they can't do that there, so they've brought the battlefield to the halls of Congress.
And, frankly, the liberal leadership have put politics ahead of sound, fiscal and national security policy. And what they have done is cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies.
Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ):
As was mentioned earlier, the majority's exit strategy is victory and freedom for the people of Iraq. Now, sadly, many on the Democratic side have revealed their exit strategy: surrender. The American people will not stand for surrender. The American people are made of sterner stuff. And the American people understand that if we turn tail and leave now more problems will visit our shores and the consequences will be far greater. And, if there's a doubt, take a look at the people of Old Europe. Take a look at the French. Take a look at what is transpiring in the streets of France.
Saddam Hussein has been deposed; he is behind bars. That is an unqualified success. Dare we now snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, plagued by poll-driven self-doubt of those who embrace surrender?
Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC):
In all of my military studies, retreat and defeat is not an option of the American military. This will only bring greater conflict in the world and ultimately to the United States, particularly in light of the attacks in Amman, Jordan, last week. Dozens of Jordanians and Palestinians were murdered by homicide bombers. We've had the bombings of buses in London, the bombings of buses in our ally of India and New Delhi.
We do not, obviously, want to see that return to the streets of the United States. We will not forget September the 11th. I'm confident the American people will stand firm in the war on terrorism.
Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-CO):
I'll confess, I come with a bit of a heavy heart. America is not a place that I think of as a land populated by people that basically cut and run.
I have a ethnic group in my district -- Hmong, people from Vietnam -- and we did that to them. We left them behind so that the communists could slaughter them as we left Vietnam. But that's not America's finest hour. We don't need another one of those. I'll tell you who will tell you categorically to stay and finish the job...
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX):
But the messages that are being sent today tell our enemies over there, those who would destroy freedom and our way of life, just like Osama bin Laden said early on, They don't have the stomach to finish the job.
Well, a majority has the stomach to finish the job and we're going to finish it.
And you expect people like that to come up. You'll have a parent or two here, as you know, whose tragic grief from the tragic loss of a loved one, of a child, causes their mental thinking to be a little destabilized. That's understandable. But the vast majority of parents know that pulling out now means their child died in vain. And there are a majority of us that do not want to see that happen. And, thank God, we've got a president that feels the same way.
Rep. John Carter (R-TX):
And I'm here to tell you that the soldiers that are going to war on behalf of this country are the best people on Earth, and they do not deserve to have people bail out on them and take the cowardly way out and say, We're going to surrender.
Let's unpack the catalog of references that these folks have thrown out there for our benefit.
Nobody will be surprised at the repeated references in this press conference to 9/11. But as we all know now, the Iraq-Al Qaida connection is a windmill.
They try to contextualize the war in Iraq to place it among the righteous fights of the two World Wars. But in those two conflicts, German aggression was a very real threat to world peace and stability. Saddam Hussein, as we now know, presented no immediate threat to us. That makes him a windmill.
They make the argument over and over and over that leaving before "the job is done" amounts to surrender. They say that we have to "finish the job" so that the soldiers who have already died will not have died in vain. Well, these people are unable to articulate what it means for the job to be finished. Without an exit strategy or precise definition of the conditions under which the job is deemed finished, then the concept of "finishing the job" is a windmill.
They accuse Murtha and anyone who agrees with him of wanting to "cut and run," or of wanting to "surrender." But Murtha voted, in effect, to give the president the authority to depose Saddam Hussein and neutralize any existing thread posed by whatever WMDs Iraq might have had stockpiled. Those goals have been achieved (and the latter goal would have been so even without an invasion, which most definitely means the WMDs were a windmill). So these Republicans have built two windmills, called them "Cut 'N Run" and "Surrender," and are now tilting ferociously at them from their comfortable chairs in Congress in an attempt not to appear cowardly.
All we're getting from these people is a display of them attacking windmills. The same meaningless platitudes like "stay the course" over and over. And those of us living in the real world understand that "staying the course" is not currently working very well for this country, and especially not for the people on the ground there for whom a policy of "staying the course" is equivalent to a greatly enhanced probability of coming home in pieces in a pine box.
If these people who want us to stay in Iraq can't come up with any better ideas for doing the work they so desperately want us to stay over there and finish, then why shouldn't we insist that our troops be brought home?
In Cervantes' novel, the character of Dulcinea never appears except for Quixote's pronouncements of her beauty and virtue. Those of us in the real world are able to see the parallels between her and the free, democratic Iraq that the Republicans have constructed in their heads.
If only it weren't for those windmills.
(Cross-posted at Progressive Lyceum)