One of the most frustrating things for those of us who pay attention is the tendency of the media to treat each aspect of Bush deception as a seperate story - Plamegate, the Downing Street Memo, failure to find WMDs, the need to "stay the course," torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, lack of due process for prisoners at Gitmo, huge contracts for companies with ties to the administration despite clear evidence of failure to perform (as well as actual fraud), and the continuing effort to conflate the war in Iraq with a meaningful response to 9/11.
The truth is that all of these "stories" are parts of the same saga - the illegal, immoral, and ultimately insane, effort to impose an immature idea of America's will on the rest of the world. It is all of a piece. Without the Neocon agenda - clearly enunciated in such published documents as this from the Project for a New American Century, we would not be engaged in this losing situation. And make no mistake, it is a losing proposition. We cannot "win" in Iraq any more than we could have won in Viet Nam. First of all, we have no objective criteria that could be used to indicate success. What if the "insurgents" quit killing people tomorrow? Would that indicate success? How long would we have to wait to know that we had "won"? What would be happening in the meantime? If we left and all hell broke loose would we have lost? Would that be any different from what is happening today? If we stayed despite the lack of insurgent activity could we justify it? How would we? Why would we?
Since we have never been honest about why we are there, we can't really be honest about what it would take for us to leave. When a majority of Americans realize the essential dishonesty of this whole enterprise it will collapse in a horrible moment of truth - and we will all look bad - just as we did leaving Viet Nam. The longer it takes to get to that point, the worse the aftermath will be.
The Bushies are likely to be left looking like the most incompetent and corrupt figures in all of American history. The rest of us who allowed these assholes to stay in power as long as they have will not fare much better. If it's true that people get the government they deserve we are really much worse than I could have imagined.
