All The King's Horses And All The King's Men

I think the central tension that official Washington is feeling about Iraq, as expressed in this recounting by Atrios, is that they all feel that, in their positions as masters of the universe, that surely SOMETHING can be done with regard to Iraq that will wipe out all of their bad predictions and wrong-headed mistakes and send Iraq on the road to stability. That option simply doesn't exist, and only precious few people are willing to admit that. For all his faults, Chuck Hagel is one of them.

SEN. HAGEL: Well, as I’ve said from the beginning, and I wasn’t the only one to say this, the outcome in Iraq will be determined by the Iraqis. It’s not going to be determined by the United States. We can help, we can support, and we have a role. Obviously we have an interest. We are where we are. We’ve got a mess on our hands in Iraq. We have done so much to undermine our own interests and influence in the Middle East, we’re going to have to find some new high ground here [...]

Well, let’s, let’s be honest here. We have a mess now. I mean, who are we kidding? We’ve got a mess now. You’ve just put up on the screen before we started this conversation what the current casualty number is. We have no good options in Iraq now. There are no good options. That’s just a fact of life. So we deal with the facts as they are.

Hagel had to say it twice for it to sink in. This is the entire problem. You have a bunch of obstinate fools in Washington, and I'm not talking about members of the executive branch but the "serious pundit" class who enable this war's continuation, who can't wrap their heads around the simple fact that there's nothing to win, and that we cannot manage any sort of stability in Iraq. It's bad if we leave and it's bad if we don't and it's bad if we take half the troops out and leave the other half in. That's just reality. We're claiming to be staying there to give breathing space to an Iraqi government that doesn't functionally exist, and that is about to be drummed out of office entirely. We claim to be stopping Al Qaeda's safe harbor, when if we would only leave the Iraqis themselves would eliminate Al Qaeda from their country within a year, and indeed they're already doing it.

This all gets back to American exceptionalism, and the belief that we're the greatest country in the world and so we must be able to fix any global problem. If Iraq hasn't totally discredited that belief, I don't know what will. But the serious pundits still cling to the hope that if we just get the right people, if we just get the right about of soldiers, if we only keep our balance on the tightrope we can traverse the Grand Canyon...

Bullshit. There's nothing good left to do, other than make room for all of the refugees we created. America is not omnipotent and it can't bumble around trying to fix everything, especially when it doesn't want to do any of the hard work of actually understanding the problem. America has a good deal of power but it's not unlimited and it's not perfectly adaptable. There simply isn't just SOMETHING that can be done. We fucked up Iraq and now we have to leave. Our responsibility to the Iraqis is outweighed by the certainty that whatever we do in service of that responsibility will make things worse. Get a boat, fill it with refugees and GO. And David Broder and David Ignatius and every conservative gasbag can whine and claim that it's a betrayal, when the true betrayal was getting us involved in the first place.

Harry Reid is going to be working very hard to get some enforceable votes on Iraq, and the White House is clearly frightened, as they called Robert Gates back from a trip to Latin America to try and manage things on Capitol Hill. Washington is 2 years behind the American people on this, and too contempuous of American citizens to think they could understand when something is unwinnable. The truth of the matter is that Washington is too wedded to old-fashioned elitist ideas of America as a shining city on a hill to comtemplate that we can't do something. That reality is why the country's in a sour mood, Cokie Roberts, because idiots like you who enable a failed war won't come to terms with your own vanity.