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John's Blog

Give a man a fish and feed him for a day....Teach him to use the internet and he won't bother you for weeks!

Sunday, June 05, 2005

Blame/Shame

Chronicles of Deaths Foretold
An outstanding analysis from TBogg of the lessons that we "thought" we had learned from Vietnam, and how this relates to our current Iraq quandary:
"Like Viet Nam, we are losing in Iraq. That's a fact. You cannot beat an insurgency that seems to have an unlimited amount of "martyrs" willing to walk into the public square and blow themselves up...With every American death, with every request for more billions for Iraq, the American public that initially supported the war starts to edge away from it as if it smells like last weeks garbage...We are running out of money, soldiers, patience, and more importantly, the will to fight in Iraq. Which is exactly what happened in Viet Nam.

So when we finally bow down to public opinion and admit defeat (only we won't admit defeat...we'll just call it a tie) and pull out of Iraq, and the power vacuum that ensues results in tribal warfare and more death and destruction, who do you think the rightwing echo chamber is going to blame? Not the neo-cons who sent us on this fools errand. Not the generals who were whistling past the graveyard when they should have been telling Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to fuck off. Not the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who waved their little flags and their well-thumbed copies of Sun Tzu and pointed out that it looked a hell of a lot easier on the Risk board.

No. They're going to blame us because we didn't wear little flag lapel pins and slap yellow ribbon magnetic stickers on our SUV's and we subverted the cause of democracy in the Middle East and that's why 1600 and counting American soldiers are dead, and the blood of every Iraqi killed in the wake of our leaving will be on our hands.

And it's all because we didn't stop them before they killed again. Shame on us."
|| JM, 12:12 AM

1 Comments:

That's ok, I'll take all the blame if we just get out. I've got small, but sturdy shoulders and I'd rather take the beating than see any more dead US or Iraqi.
Anonymous Anonymous, at 8:17 PM  

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