Among the more rabid neocons and perhaps more quietly among the broader hawkish conservative movement, there are grumbles that the Vietnam War could have been won if not for the dirty hippies, the protesters, the Joan Baezes and Jane Fondas.
I think one effect of current policies will be to set up for the same thing so that 30 years from now the Children of St. Reagan will have a narrative that everything was going fine, Bush was valiantly fighting the Global War on Terror (the biggest thing since St Reagan won the Cold War) and it was only the Democrat's weakness that pulled us out of Iraq and lost the war.
Mr. Bush admits no mistakes. If you just listened to him, the Iraq war is in a hard and crucial phase of the GWoT. "Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure" He still thinks failure is a date in the future! We all know that the failure has already happened. A long string of failures starting with the failures of intelligence and policy that got us into the war, failures to understand the occupied country and people, failures to adjust to changing situations (because that would admit things were changing for the worse).
So, as long as Mr. Bush sticks to that and never says otherwise, what record will there be around in 30 years to say otherwise? With the exception of the libertarian-minded non-intervention policy of Rep. Paul, last weeks' Republican debate was full of people who would perpetuate the Republican myth about the Iraq war. Even if they lose the election, if they stay in Iraq until then, they'll just blame the winning Democrat for "losing" when the withdrawal is ordered. If they leave before then, they'll blame Democrats for forcing it somehow. We need to be ready for this, but really we should already be telling the other story, how the Republican government screwed up, and Democrats will do their best to try and clean up the pieces.
History is written by the victor. The progressive movement needs a decisive victory in the next 10 years. We need the neocon-theocrat-hawk movement to be shamed and personally defeated. Every one of them needs to understand the failure and wrongness of the ideas they held. They need to understand that their GWoT and government mismanagement and NCLB and corporatocracy failed not because of meddling from liberals but because of the inherent wrongness of those policies.
Our victory will be a victory of ideals and ideas. If I had my way, every one of our talking heads would pick whichever issue they like and start telling a story like this:
- flawed Republican policy
- bad result that happened
- Democratic alternative
- how it will be better
And if there's time for a larger discussion, take a step back and discuss a
flawed Republican social theory, the collection of bad policies and failures that result, and a better theory and set of things to try.
But of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.