Victory/Defeat

I was just listening to Chris Mathews and Dana Milbank cracking wise and admiring Bush's new Iraq PR offensive.  It's brilliant don't ya know?  Dana thinks Howard Dean is the perfect dupe.  After all, Bush is talking about "Victory" and stupid Howard went and said the word "Defeat" and we all know that the American public is so dense, they will automatically support the guy who sez "Victory", and not the guy who sez "Defeat".  I mean Duh!  We're Americans dammit and one thing we don't abide is a loser.

But if you've got a moment Dana, I'd like to point out a couple of things.  Howard Dean, isn't getting his ass handed to him by a rag-tag bunch of disorganized Arabs in a bombed to shit country halfway around the world.

The U.S. Army and Marines won the battle of Bagdad, destroyed Saddam's army, and captured the bastard.

George Bush and the incompetent Neocons (The foreign arm of FEMA) have lost any hope of winning the subsequent war for Iraq.  This means that, unfortunately, the net result of the battle of Bagdad is a worse state of affairs than if the whole adventure had never begun.  That is decidedly not the fault of the Army or the Marines who performed their mission with valor.

But the political decisions about going in, and the political decisions regarding the aftermath were wrong, and fatal to the mission.  And because of these errors, we lost.  We lost, before we began.  We lost because we began without the support of the population.  We lied to ourselves that we had their support and we did not.  And that lie was crucial because the answer to the question of whether or not our military intervention enjoyed broad popular support within Iraq prior to the invasion was the key to whether or not we ever had a chance of making this experiment work.

The fact is that without broad popular support, there was never any chance that this could work.  Just take a moment to think about it.  If the population is hostile, and they had an army of over a million men, if those guys took off their uniforms and melted back into the population, how would we ever be able to sort them out?  

If a large fraction of the population is hostile, and there is an active resistance, how can you ever sort them out?  We are putting our troops into a completely impossible situation.  They will never know who is friend and who is foe.  All of this was completely foreseeable long before we ever went in there.  It was all critically dependent upon the level of popular support for our intervention.  And it seemed at the time that there was precious little evidence that the people of Iraq were begging for us to invade them.  In fact, it was quite clear the the only Iraqis that were pushing that line were exiles, and we all know or at least should know that you are not supposed to believe exiles.  That has been known for over 400 years.

So, Dana, if we are going to talk about losers, let's talk about the guys who lost the Iraq war.  That would be the idiots who decided to invade and occupy a country the size of California with a hostile population of over 20 million with less than 200,000 troops.