Just to clarify, that quote means that Kissinger is advising Bush that we have to win before we leave, right? He’s not saying that the only way to win is to leave, as in, “the sooner the better.”
That’s what I took from the quote – he’s saying we shouldn’t leave until we’ve achieved some meaningful victory – but I thought you might be using it to mean the opposite, so I looked at the article you linked, and it seems to agree with my interpretation, albeit not in a complimentary way. Specifically, the article seems to suggest that if Kissinger is saying it, and he said similar things about Vietnam, then it must be wrong. From the ABC News article:
Its a whory old myth from the Viet Nam era, the notion that we would have won if the liberals hadn’t tied our hands, or if we had the will. Utter rot. It wasn’t so much a matter of our will but our enemy’s. We’re talking about people who learned guerilla warfare at their grandfather’s knee! They were perfectly willing to endure any hardship and suffer any losses to have their way. The Chinese, the French, the Japanese, the French again, and then us. They were not ever going to give up.
(I remember my cousin coming back from overseas, told me his drill instructor had said that he was going to Viet Nam and he would encounter the most brave, most disciplined, resourceful and dedicated soldiers he would ever meet. Unfortunately, he would be there to kill them…)
But the myth persists. Why, if only we had stayed the course, Viet Nam might be a third rate backwater where they make tennis shoes! That is the “lesson” they got from Viet Nam. I don’t think LBJ said “Stay the course” in so many words, but the deranged principle is the same: keep gluing feathers together in hope of building a duck.
Pity McNamara’s gone, he could fill in Boy George on a few points.
*But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We’re – waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man’ll be over his head, we’re
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!*
—Pete Seeger
I don’t think that Bush’s strategy is to stay the course until we inevitably win. I believe his strategy is to stay the course until it inevitably becomes someone else’s problem.
It’s not about what is good for either country, it’s about what is good for him.
McNamara is *not * gone, he’s just been silent, condemning himself to watch his own blunders get repeated, by those who *could * have remembered the past if they’d been part of it at the time. After all these decades, apparently McNamara *still * has learned nothing, and still refuses to take even a mere citizen’s level of responsibility.
There is no meaningful victory to be had. No matter what happens, as soon as we decide to leave, the terrorists will declare a political victory for themselves just like they did with the Israelis in Lebanon.
But the funny thing is that a lot of people still say they don’t think we should just up and leave.
So the question remains, forgetting some stupid notion of “victory”, what is the exit strategy?
Personally, I think we should just declare “Victory” ourselves…again, ratchet down the level of troops over the next six months, maintain a minimal presence of advisors and special operations types and hold a big freakin V-I parade through Times Square.
McNamara hasn’t been exactly silent. He dropped quite a few pearls of wisdom in The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003). It does require some reading between the lines, though, to see the application of his hard-won wisdom to our present situation.
Victory is near. We will have the oil protected. Our imilitary installations are secure.Our huge new embassy will be impenetrable .Then we let them go at it among themselves. We then deal with the winner.
We may have a winner, except how easily can the oil infrastructure be protected when it’s in a war zone? Can you really just wall it off and let the storm rage outside? You’ve got wells and pipelines scattered all around. Lots of potential targets that might be relatively easy to destroy or disrupt with cheap explosives and the cheaper lives of jihadists willing to blow themselves up or risk death to commit sabotage. Maybe it’s easier to defend the Iraqi oil industry than I think, I dunno. If not, I should think some level of stability is required to fully regain reliable access to those fields.
They are doing it now. Oil is pumping.
Of course if our aim is to bring Democracy to them , we are in trouble.If we are stabilizing the Middle East ,we are in trouble. If we are making the world safe for Democracy,no good.
Are we making allies.nope. No victory can even be defined now,let alone acheived.
Its not. If anything, its much harder even then now. gonzomax has a rather, er, odd way of looking at things…filtered through his own interesting perspectives without really touching on the real world. Don’t let pesky things like reality (such as ACTUALLY trying to protect the oil infrastructure when things become an order of magnitude worse than now as ‘we let them go at it among themselves’ in a full scale civil/religious blood fest), not when things can be so neat and clean. The US, with our evil plan unfolding just as we want, can now sit back and let the Iraqi’s kill each other off in droves (instead of in bits and pieces as they presently are), and we will be happy because praise the gods! The oil is safe (somehow)!
Er, right.
Well, if you are willing to declare gonzomax the victor, then I want to put my own disconnected from reality proposal forward. All we have to do to win is get some space aliens to invade Iraq and we nuke the whole place from orbit…but we use our sooper sekrit nukes that wipe out everything (aliens, buildings, terrorists/insurents, lawyers, etc) except the oil fields and the ‘good people’. Then we move in (it will all ready be paved after all, and no need for lights with all that glowy stuff ), and annex the lot as a new state!
Yup. It’s safe from China and other potential rivals of the US, like PNAC wanted, and less oil on the market let’s Bush’s oil buddies raise prices. Plus, lots of people die, which give Republicans orgasms.
Oh, and it’s praise God; only hell-bound foreigners and Democrats praise gods.
Isn’t China currently in negotiations with the Iraqi Government to develop one of the southern Oil fields? It was part of a deal Saddams government brokered in 96 I think and now the Iraqis and Chinese are re-negotiating the deal for investment opportunities.
So unless the US and China are in Cahoots, I don’t seem to think all the Oil of Iraq is purely going to the US.
You missed the point I and Loopydude were making; little oil is likely to go anywhere, as long as the resistance keeps blowing up oil pipes and such. Which is the way Bush likes it, I expect.
As much as I appreciate opinions that make me look moderate and centrist by comparison, this is just plain silly! What GeeDubya wants more than a pony is a stable, bourgeois, business oriented Iraq with white picket fences, Starbucks, and Shia, Kurds and Sunni dancing around the Maypole singing “Kumballah”.
), and annex the lot as a new state!