Arnaud de Borchgrave plays word games:
The costly effort in blood and treasure to foster democracy in Iraq is clearly beyond our reach. Henry Kissinger, chief mandarin of geopoliticians, who negotiated the 1973 agreements that ended the Vietnam War, says Iraq is unwinnable. If by victory, he explained, we mean a viable democratic Iraqi state, able to sustain itself, forget it because it can’t be done. A far cry from “failure is not an option.”
The “go big,” “go long,” and “go home” options bear little relationship to the art of the possible. A broken military cannot afford to go big, unless, of course, the draft is re-enacted, which a Democratic Congress would reject. To go long would require domestic support, which has waned to 30 percent. And to pack it in and go home under Option 3 would be tantamount to surrender to America’s enemies throughout the Middle East. Borne out, too, would be Osama bin Laden’s predictions about America’s lack of staying power. This weekend, Jordan’s King Abdullah warned against the danger of civil wars breaking out in neighboring Arab countries.
While I would not say that the US military is broken – the fact that it’s having problems doing something that no military is designed to do doesn’t mean that it can’t fulfill its true purposes – the democracy project is impossible. I argued that it was a deeply stupid proposition from the start, only now has this become obvious to everyone but the most clueless of the neoconned.
What’s strange is the stubborn assertion that going home “is not possible”. Of course it is! In fact, it’s not only possible, as it has been since the beginninng, but is now thankfully probable. I really despise this sort of attempt to control the agenda by perverting the language, it’s sad to see how conservative commentators now write almost as deceptively as their liberal counterparts.