{"id":5021,"date":"2005-08-24T16:14:27","date_gmt":"2005-08-24T23:14:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=5021"},"modified":"2005-08-24T16:14:27","modified_gmt":"2005-08-24T23:14:27","slug":"and-here-i-thought-alan-colmes-was-the-delicious-rich-paste-of-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=5021","title":{"rendered":"And here I thought Alan Colmes was the “delicious, rich paste of failure”…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pandagon’s Jesse Taylor, on what he sees as the Bushies’ attempt to redefine victory<\/a> in Iraq:<\/p>\n

\n

Here’s the thing—both sides are right. Bush is still calling for “victory”—it’s just that the standard definition of “victory” has been misapplied so many times that getting Iraqi troops trained and us the hell out is pretty much the only standard that can remain consisten [sic] until it actually happens. Victory was getting the WMD, until there weren’t any; then it was ending Saddam’s ties to terrorists, until there not only weren’t any ties, but a lot more terrorists in Iraq after the fall than before; then it was providing freedom and democracy, which has pretty much devolved to not letting the current constitutional convention fall apart without producing something<\/b> (don’t put Mohammed Atta’s picture on it, because it will never be seen again); it’s also, at various times, been the “model state” theory, the “democracy domino” theory, the “staging ground for a wider military transformation” theory, and, at various points, the “otherwise America fails” theory, the “Iraq has good hummus” theory and the “Ted Kennedy’s in one of those silos” theory.<\/b>\n<\/p>\n

\nBush wants “victory”, but like most everything else about this war, what he’s talking about and what the War Brigade wants <\/i>him to be talking about are getting smashed together into a delicious, rich paste of failure [my emphases]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nWhat is so astounding about this piece of garbled thinking is not so much its failure to recognize that there really can<\/i> be many smaller victories that, taken together, make up a larger “victory”—and that it’s both possible and reasonable to separate the two for diagnostic or descriptive purposes without having “misapplied” anything—but rather, Taylor’s blatant and willful disregard for the facts, an epistemological failing laced through the entire threadbare tapestry of his piece.\n<\/p>\n

\nFirst, Bush never defined victory in Iraq as “getting the WMD,” though clearly had we found them that would have been a<\/i> victory—just as toppling Saddam’s regime was a<\/i> victory in the Iraq campaign (which both President Bush <\/a>and Donald Rumsfeld<\/a> have always held would be a long and difficult one). \n<\/p>\n

\nSecond, to claim that Saddam had no ties to terrorists<\/a> is simply breathtaking, given his funding <\/a>of Palestinian suicide bombers, his connections to both Abu Nidal<\/a> and Zarqawi<\/a>, Salman Pak<\/a>, and his leadership of a Ba’athist regime that was itself running a terrorist state (not to mention the warnings<\/a> we received from foreign leaders suggesting that Saddam was planning terror strikes).  Clearly, what Jesse is so poorly trying to point out is that Saddam didn’t have ties to al Qaeda terrorists<\/a>, something that the 911 Commission Report refutes<\/a>, though it does say that no evidence of an operational relationship could be proven.  Which means only that no documentation has turned up to verify that Hussein and al Qaeda entered into any kind of formal agreement—though it’s an established fact that they had worked together before, and that bin Laden did, in fact, meet with Iraqi intelligence. \n<\/p>\n

\nThird, it is simply ridiculous to suggest, as Jesse does, that the Administration did not expect foreign terrorists<\/a> to flock to Iraq in the wake of Saddam’s fall.  Whether or not you agree with the flypaper theory<\/a> (intentional), or whether you view this influx of enemy fighters as a problem for US forces (contingent), the objective fact<\/i> is, the US both expected and prepared for foreign fighters to pour into Iraq to take a stand against the potential formation of a mideast democracy, though they underestimated the numbers [ed – the Drezner link points to an August 2003 LA Times story detailing how the US had been seeking another U.N. Security Council resolution in Iraq, one that would “call on Iraq’s neighbors, particularly Iran and Syria, to block the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq”<\/i>.]\n<\/p>\n

\nFourth, democracy is<\/i> taking place<\/a> in Iraq; and though I worry about some provisions<\/a> of the Iraq draft constitution—and will willingly declare<\/a> the entire Iraq enterprise a failure if the country doesn’t come out of this with a constitution that guarantees minority rights and the rule of law—such is simply not the case<\/a>, I don’t think.  And again, it is not true to claim that the State Department or the military will be happy with any old “something” coming out of the constitutional convention, though clearly one of the inconveniences of providing others with freedom is that, in asserting it, they may not agree with you on every point of governance. \n<\/p>\n

\nThe point of all this being that Taylor’s strained attempt to reframe the Iraq situation as a “delicious, rich paste of failure” depends entirely upon his readers’ willingness to accept the false premises he sets up in an effort to suggest Bush’s supposed deviations.  The truth is, Bush has wanted the same thing all along<\/a>:  a free and self-sufficient Iraq, governed by Iraqis, whose leadership will no longer pose a threat to the US by potentially providing state sponsered aid and succor to al Qaeda terrorists. \n<\/p>\n

\nWhich means that, rather than the Bushies, it is people like Jesse¹—those who continue to insist, cynically and dishonestly, that WMD was the casus belli<\/i> rather than a single bullet point (for clarification, see the bipartisan Joint Resolution<\/a>, and before that, the Clinton-era Iraq Regime Change<\/a> legislation)—who keep trying to redefine every victory into a defeat, be it by declaring everything short of perfection a dismal failure, or by minimizing each success by characterizing it as baseline given rather than a goal actively achieved.\n<\/p>\n

\n¹to be fair, some on the right<\/a> have begun making such revisionist claims, as well.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pandagon’s Jesse Taylor, on what he sees as the Bushies’ attempt to redefine victory in Iraq: Here’s the thing—both sides are right. Bush is still calling for “victory”—it’s just that the standard definition of “victory” has been misapplied so many times that getting Iraqi troops trained and us the hell out is pretty much the only standard that can remain consisten [sic] until it actually happens. Victory was getting the<\/p>\n

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