Blaming The Victim

The President has become ever more incoherent when talking about Iraq, today going back on everything he's been saying since 2004 and suggesting that there's such a thing as an acceptable level of violence in that country.

Either we'll succeed, or we won't succeed. And the definition of success as I described is sectarian violence down. Success is not, no violence. There are parts of our own country that have got a certain level of violence to it. But success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives. And that's what we're trying to achieve.

Shorter Bush: If Iraq is, say, the Gaza Strip, then we've done our job and we've won.

So now, if you want to line everything up, it looks like this to the Bush spinners. If there's less violence, that means we're winning. If there's "an acceptable level of violence," we're winning. If there's more violence, we're winning because that means the insurgents are desperate. Under literally any security situation in Iraq, there's some spin that this means the United States is winning the war. And that's what has Americans so frustrated, because they cannot hope to expect that they are being told the truth when confronted with this twisted logic.

Furthermore, any attempt to pole vault reality over the castle walls of conservatism that they built for themselves is an exercise in futility.

Hugh Hewitt: [Lawrence Wright] said absolutely, it is not the case it’s a strategic disaster. While there may be more jihadis in Iraq than there were before, it’s not like our intervention in Iraq created them, and he went on to characterize their camps in Mali, their camps in Gaza…

Michael Isikoff: Right.

HH: Their Waziristan…that they are manufacturing…they were manufactured for a decade in Afghanistan.

MI: Right.

HH: And now, they’re coming to al Anbar Province, because that’s where they can kill the great Satan. And so we’re not manufacturing them, we’re gathering them in one place…

MI: Right.

HH: And they’re surging against us. That’s a different spin. I’m not saying it’s the facts on the ground, either.
[...]

MI: We have to guess. We have to guess. I mean, we know that a lot of bad guesses were made by this administration in the invasion.

HH: Again, that’s spin.

MI: No, no, no, no, no, no. We know that.

HH: Give me a specific.

MI: They did not…a specific?

HH: Of a bad guess.

MI: Did they anticipate the sectarian warfare that was going to take place?

HH: No. Okay…

MI: Did they tell the country that there’s a high risk that we’re going to be enmeshed in a civil war in Iraq, in which thousands of Americans…

HH: Civil war is itself a spin, though.

MI: Well, what do you call it?

HH: That is a characterization…I call it an insurrection, I call it an al Qaeda surge, I call it bad militias in Baghdad.

MI: Well…

HH: But a civil war, where you’ve got Sunni and Shia…actually, the one thing Petraeus has also said…

MI: Fighting each other. Fighting each other. That’s…

HH: There are lots of definitions. It’s spin.

Reality has no meaning to committed Bush-defending conservatives. They can shrug it off and call it spin while at the same time employing the argument "If there's more violence, that means we're winning" without considering that spin at all. The American people are sick to death of these bullshit justifications for an unnecessary disaster of a war.

And that is the point at which they pull out the biggest spin of all; that the people who are tired of the lies about Iraq are the ones to blame for the loss.

TROUBLING THOUGHTS ON IRAQ, from Rick Moran. Sadly, I agree that our domestic political situation will make constructive action difficult. As I've said before, it was obvious in the 1990s that we had a dysfunctional political class, but it's become much more obvious in the current decade. (Via TMV). And yes, time's the enemy now. Pentagon planners talk about the "three year rule" for domestic support in a war, and it's been four -- five if you count Afghanistan.

This "blame the American people" idea has been building for some time - Jonah Goldberg did a typical column for this genre a little while back saying that you can't use public opinion polls as a judge because people are stupid. And in fact, Vietnam was only lost because America lost their will to win. This Tinkerbell strategy ("clap louder!"), this exceptionalist myht that America can never lose at anything, this is all the most dangerous attitude in the world. It pre-empts rational thought, and ensures that if a mistake is ever made, it will be compounded over and over because only glorious victory is acceptable. This isn't 300 and this isn't the turning point of Act II. This is real war, where real lives (not chickenhawk conservatives, but somebody else's) are at stake, and you cannot put aside facts as inconvenient and blame only those who pay attention to them. It's like someone trying to cook an egg, and burning the food and the skillet and the stove and nearly the entire kitchen, the whole time saying "just a sec, have some patience, I'm almost done," and then when they're finally taken out of the house, yelling at the fire crews because "you ruined my perfectly good breakfast!"

I will not let this smear merchants who want no responsibility for the death march across Iraq try to pin this tragedy on people who are simply pleading for this to stop. It is the opposite of reason to claim that America can only be stopped by itself. I've had it.