Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

But We Were Right

What do you do when some grand enterprise that you’ve staked your credibility and reputation on goes completely to hell? There are two basic options. You can either (a) claim that your idea was really very good, and it would have totally worked if the morons running the show hadn’t fucked it up; or (b) claim that the idea was good, and it is totally working, and we just need to keep doing the same stuff over and over again, except, you know, more.

You’re seeing both camps springing up in the aftermath of the administration’s inevitable failure in Iraq. The people in charge are going with Door #2. Bush reached into his bag of empty euphemisms and came up with “Surge”, his nifty new name for more of the same: 30,000 more troops hurled into the abyss, to both forestall and worsen the eventual collapse. It looks like he’s going to get his way, too: we’re watching an elaborate piece of kabuki theater right now, where generals who are opposed to the idea, but who take orders from the president, “come around” to Bush’s point of view.

These people would seem to be the more dangerous — and in the short term, they certainly are. But the first variety of war apologists, the ones who regret the outcome but not the decision, are possibly even worse. People like:

1. Richard Perle: “I don’t think [Bush] realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty.”
2. Kenneth Adelman: “The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless.”
3. Thomas Friedman: “Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it is not happening”
4. Ken Pollack: “Perhaps at some point in the future, revisionist historians will try to claim that the effort was doomed from the start … However, that is decidedly not the view of the experts, the journalists covering the story, or the practitioners who went to Iraq to put the country back together after the 2003 invasion.”

These guys are strung out pretty much all along the political spectrum, but they’re united in their inability to admit error, or to see beyond their own crumbling ideologies. There were really only two options here: failing competently, or failing spectacularly. Bush went the spectacular route, and in so doing has done the war’s apologists a huge favor: he’s masked the fundamental error of the entire enterprise. He set fire to the house before it had a chance to collapse on its own.

So when this is all over, thirty years from now, and another opportunity arises to sink ourselves into another quagmire, you can bet the descendants of Group B will be back, promising us that, this time, it’ll work out fine.

I won’t tell you my identity, no I on’t My fellow Ameracin, but i no wer u live, and soon, u wontlive at all.