I’m going to do something that goes against what could be called the Cardinal Rule of Liberal Blogging: sympathizing with Bush or neoconservatives. I’m sorry, but as a generally softhearted liberal wonk, it’s unavoidable for me.
The catalyst for this was reports of Cheney’s recent visit to Iraq. Once again, he flew headfirst into a noose by touting success and progress just as a suicide bomber killed a few dozen people. It’s certainly not the first time claims of achievements have been drowned out by the sounds of explosions.
That cuts to the heart of why Iraq has been fashioned to be unwinnable, however. Suicide bombings are a terrible occurrence, let’s not forget that for a moment. They’re a horror we in the United States have been fortunate enough to not know first hand. They create a fear that is hard to understand to an outsider: that of not knowing if you’ll be killed with no warning while sitting somewhere you normally consider safe.
In fact, they’re a horror that many countries have to deal with. Some on a tragically regular basis such as Israel. That’s why many gave less sympathy to the United States post-9/11 than we thought we were entitled to; they have to deal with such things fairly often.
If our goal was simply to prop Iraq up and get the hell out of there, these attacks wouldn’t be considered such monumental backslides. We would see what we can do to get the government to hold together and have them take care of the thugs and berserkers.
Unfortunately, that’s not an option for our “war president” and his troupe. At the onset, Iraq was called a part of the “War on Terror” and acts of terror, concordantly, were acts of war. In 2004 John Kerry got into hot water by claiming that terrorists should be dealt with by law officials. To many of us, that sounded like a fairly reasonable proposal: it meant blunting attacks without launching wars against nations that weren’t actually connected to the attackers.
By the right’s definition, these are acts of war. They cannot be relegated to law enforcement along the lines of normal murder, and this leaves us in a terrible lake of quicksand. They have put themselves in the position of having to stave off a declaration of true victory until any and all such acts have ceased entirely.
That’s not only unrealistic, it wouldn’t be required by most whose main goal is general stability. It’s a tumultuous area, many countries have to deal with terrorism. The goal would normally be to get a government set up and let them take over the duties of punishing and preventing bombings and the like. They’ll likely never “end”, but it can be managed in the hands of capable law enforcement.
Now, though, we’re stuck in a prison of our own making. We’ve set the definitions so that acts of terrorism are evidence our mission is not over and potentially expanding. It makes me wonder if Bush, et al, really don’t want to keep the wars going but realize that they can’t back down from their own rallying cry, leaving them trapped along this path.
So, again, I sympathize with them, I think.
