Quote:The protagonists divide into three broad groups.
The Bush dead-enders. Although dwindling in number, President Bush's defenders will ascribe failure in Iraq to a loss of nerve, blaming media bias and liberal defeatists for sowing the erroneous impression that the war has become unwinnable. Bush loyalists will portray opposition to the war as tantamount to betraying the troops. Count on them to appropriate Ronald Reagan's description of Vietnam as "an honorable cause." Updating the "stab in the back" thesis, they will claim that a collapse of will on the home front snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Baghdad as surely as it did in Saigon.
The buck-stops-at-the-top camp. Adherents of this second view are currently in the ascendant, attributing the troubles roiling Iraq to massive incompetence in the Bush administration. In a war notable for an absence of accountability, demands for fixing accountability are becoming increasingly insistent. Parties eager to divert attention from their own culpability are pointing fingers. Senior military officers target Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Congressional Democrats who voted for the war and neoconservatives direct their fire against Rumsfeld and Bush. The theme common to all of these finger-pointers: Don't blame us; the Bush team's stupidity, stubbornness and internal dysfunction doomed the American effort.
The conspiracy theorists. Even before the United States invaded Iraq, critics on the far left and far right charged that powerful groups operating behind the scenes were promoting war for their own nefarious purposes. Big Oil, Halliburton, the military-industrial complex and Protestant evangelicals said to be keen on defending Israel all came in for criticism and even grassy-knoll-style paranoia.
Of course, it's all America's fault....both for getting us into this fight and then bumbling the fight once we were engaged. No credit at all should be given the terrorists and insurgents who adroitly used the world media, America's political process, and our own squeamishness to "win the war".
No one person
lost the war. Muslim fundamentalists
won it by "staying the course" longer than America could.
Placing the blame serves no purpose other than a self-serving whitewash feeling that, at least it wasn't my fault.
If it is truly lost, the key point to remember is that America, as a nation, lost it......and I can only hope that the implications are as benign as those of Vietnam. Like after Vietnam, we will mourn the loss of thousands of soldiers (and civilians as well) who died for nothing. Iraq will fall into civil war but, after much killing of fellow Iraqis, eventually beat themselves into some fashion of government, or group of separate nations, thus allowing the bloodshed to stop. And all will be good and forgotten a few decades later.
Unfortunately, the more likely outcome is that terrorists will be emboldened by the defeat of Ameria. The impression will be reinforced that America (and its interests) can be defeated by persistent small attacks regularly conducted over a period of three or less years. Bin Laden will have been proven corrrect...America is a paper tiger. Bloody their nose a few times and they will go home. Terrorism will have proven itself as a successful political strategy for those brutal enough to execute it. New groups with their own personal vendetta against the US will attempt and succeed with the same tactics. The world will change once again, with the nations, even superpowers, impotent to influence events outside their own territorial boundaries.
) but those boys & girls in the burkas & baggy pants/dresses will follow our guys & gals home. You can count on that.
