I should explain that I do not accept this argument, I find the assumptions it is based on unconvincing, and it seems to me rather that by voting it down we have again given the Bushites our consent to continue unilaterally. However, it seems worth putting the argument up, some of the points he makes seem well taken. So flame on.The uproar in the House of Representatives on the Friday before Thanksgiving over the Republicans’ phony proposal for “immediate withdrawal” of U.S. troops from Iraq revealed not just that their side of the aisle swarms with political reptiles and 40-year-old high-school debaters; that much isn’t news, even to independents like me. What it really showed is that Republicans now desperately need the anti-war movement their Democratic colleagues refused to give them in the vote on the resolution.
Republicans want an anti-war movement like that of the 1960s to cover their own cut-and-run strategy, which has been to send “our brave men and women” to fight while cutting taxes that would pay for adequate armor and benefits, and while dodging the institution of a draft to distribute the war’s burdens fairly; and then to run for re-election on the conservative-Wilsonian philosophy that supposedly drives this dubious grand strategy.
The warmakers’ predicament has become all the more excruciating because it was so completely self-induced. Determined in 2003 to show that the Iraq war would be different from the one in Vietnam, they convincingly assailed "deja-vu" Democrats and other dissenters, who were predicting reruns of Vietnam's trumped-up pretexts, massive overkill, and bottomless quagmires.
Iraq is different, the warmakers insisted, but they were right in ways they never intended. They were so successful at deflecting and silencing every warning or doubt that they had no one to blame but themselves when, instead of being conveyed through grateful, flower-strewing throngs on June 30, 2004, Ambassador Paul Bremer III had to be rushed out of the Green Zone two days early, as his American successors may have to be with the desert equivalent of Vietnam "boat people" clinging to their heels.
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