Josh Trevino's latest drew attention because of his references to concentration camps. I was stunned by his endorsement of empty rhetoric:
What was good about the President’s speech? He remains committed to victory. Whether he will achieve it or not is a separate matter; the mere fact that he seeks it sets him on a moral plane above the mass of the American left that thinks defeat a wholly palatable option.
Mr. Trevino, no one thinks it a palatable option. Just as no one thinks any catastrophic strategic blunder, like this Iraq Debacle, palatable. But wishing does not make it different. A SERIOUS and patriotic person would put away his McCarthyite insults and deal with the well being of the nation. You apparently prefer to insult than think what is best for our country. I once thought you better than that. I see I was wrong. More.
Trevino's anger at being made a fool of by a morally bankrupt President and Party has led him to heretofore unseen heights (from him) of mindlessness, insults and frankly, stupidity. This Trevino is not the man I respected, who wrote in May 2006:
A profound strategic conundrum faces the United States. It does not and has never had the ability to impose its will upon the country at large. . . . The contention that the United States can quell the bulk of armed Iraqi Shi’ism is a tenuous one indeed. If the whole country devolves into al Anbar, the strain upon the American Army will become intolerable.
The saving grace — of sorts — of this situation is that the Badrists, at least, don’t particularly want to fight Americans. The confrontation between the Shi’a at large and the Americans thus becomes purely optional for the latter. Optional, that is, so long as the Americans acquiesce to the slaughter of the Sunnis and the inevitable delegitimization of the government of Iraq. The logical end of this is a slow-motion bloodbath, in which the Sunnis receive in full the treatment they have meted out to Shi’a, Kurd and Assyrian over most of the past century; in which Shi’a militia eventually force a contest with the Kurds for Kirkuk and the borderlands; and in which the controlling power of Iraq sits in Tehran.
This is, for now, the course of action that the Americans have been following. Even if there was political will to enforce the will of a government lacking the basic mechanisms of state power — most fundamentally, the monopoly on violence within its borders — the military capacity is simply not there. . . .
We stand at the precipice. Civil war in Iraq is upon us, and there are no good options. Acquiescing to the probable victor brings us grave moral compromise. Protection of the probable loser brings us a conflict we cannot afford. Withdrawal from the scene brings us yet more terrible dangers further down the road. It is a sorry situation in which the American Army and Marines are reduced to yet another militia in the Mesopotamian cauldron. The pity is that this was all avoidable. Every misstep that brought us to it was foreseeable and preventable. General Shinseki warned us about the undermanning. The world cried out against the precedent-setting looting. Many informed observers denounced the disbanding of the old Iraqi Army. And I was appalled at the repeated escapes, which we allowed, of Moqtada al Sadr.
We went to Iraq for the best of reasons. I believe that. I believe the mission was moral and achievable one. But it is as I wrote: I was wrong to think that the Administration of George W. Bush was competent to act upon any of the given beliefs. As we look into the abyss, we are forced to remember that someone had to dig it.
Now this new ugly, thoughtless, insulting Trevino has emerged, lashing out at anyone who believes that it is over in Iraq, even though he himself wrote as much in May 2006.
There were once two Republican conservative bloggers I respected. Now there is one -- John Cole.