Twenty-Five Reasons to Continue the War

    Certain facts that have emerged since the invasion of Iraq are indisputable.  Namely, once you move past the generally agreed upon principle that Saddam Hussein was a bad ruler, every reason put forward for the necessity of the invasion of Iraq has been proven wrong.  
   There were no weapons of mass destruction.  There was no nuclear capability.  There was no connection with al Qaeda. There was no involvement in the attacks of 9/11.  The people of Iraq were not anxious to welcome an invading power much less eager for that power to impose its own preference of government upon them.  
   Nor was Iraq a gathering threat as supposed but a much diminished state of no real consequence easily contained with the merest tip of the little finger of the power of the United States and the international community. The containment regimen had worked and was continuing to work largely as designed.  Rather than an impending crisis which had to be addressed preemptively and in haste to avoid imminent attack on ourselves as we were told, Iraq was a passive annoyance able to be addressed at our leisure and by whatever diplomatic means we chose.  Clearly an invasion of Iraq was an absolutely unnecessary war of choice, a severe overreaction and an extreme miscalculation of historic proportions.
   If you can imagine an equivalent error in medicine it would represent the difference in diagnosing an easily treatable head cold with rest and inexpensive, over the counter medication; versus the same symptoms misdiagnosed as cancer requiring immediate expensive hospitalization and massively extensive brain surgery.
   This is how a containment policy which was costing us 3 billion dollars a year without a single loss of life was replaced with a 4 year long war costing us billions of dollars a week and tens of thousands of lives lost and many, many more thousands wounded with no end in sight.  For all this expenditure it is a stretch to say that either Iraq or our foreign policy is better off today for all these Herculean efforts.  To turn a moderately ill patient into one on life support requiring extraordinarily expensive 24 hour care, is neither good medicine nor good policy.  In medicine licenses would be confiscated for such rampant life threatening malpractice.  Yet those who inflicted the fiasco of Iraq upon us have been rewarded with medals of freedom, promotion and even reelection.
    By now, the war in Iraq has become a false or self-defeating syllogism: A war is fought for an erroneous premise, the war is being “lost”, so we must fight harder to “win” the war we never should have fought to begin with.  But win what?  We are fighting a war not to win anything tangible but in order to avoid losing even more.  But since, according to the terms of its rationale, there was never any true or rational national interest in attacking Iraq in the first place then by its own internal definition we may not be victorious in it.  The war itself is the irretrievable sum of our loss.  Even if we “win” this purely Pyrrhic war, according to some mis-definition of the word or other, naturally, we will still lose.  In Iraq we are fighting against the grain of natural history.  This is the essence of folly. 

   Clearly, unless they possessed ulterior motives, once all the reasons given for invading Iraq were proven invalid any competent administration should have immediately cut our losses and pulled our forces out.  As there was no initial reason for or benefit from attacking Iraq then everything which would follow from it could only be considered of no value.  It is all cost with no reward. 
   If you are gulled into buying a car that doesn’t run it is the definition of drooling insanity to simply sit in it for years playing with the knobs.  And if you are dumb enough to mistake a stone for an orange, no amount of squeezing or gnawing on it, no matter how many teeth you lose, is going to reward you with orange juice.  The entire reason for the war in Iraq was obviated by the errors of its instigation and yet it has continued, adrift of policy, now into its fifth years, as purposeless as a boat without sail or rudder.
    So even though the war was completely
- unnecessary - by the refuted logic of its own instigation;
- is unwinnable – by its own incompetently changing formulation;
- is contradictory - to its own rational;
- and is counterproductive - to its original purpose;
it has been allowed to continue for four years pointlessly, as a matter of sheer moral inertia apparently for domestic political purposes, in the hope that no one will notice that it should have never been begun to begin with.  This surely seems like folly.
   Yet proponents of this war are still vigorous in their attempts to justify it with arguments that are both ingenious and bizarre.  The loose components of the main outline of their basic arguments I will attempt to summarize in no particular order of importance.  To be fair to them (and by way of fair warning to you) I will try to be as comprehensive as possible.

Section I - Stay the course we’re on right or wrong

1. Stay the course and finish the job
   With the logic of drunken gamblers the war’s supporters claim that our losses in this war are already so grave that we must continue to accumulate them to justify the costs we have already incurred.  Even though it is universally agreed that we have set out upon the wrong course for all the wrong reasons, they claim that this course cannot be reversed and must be maintained indefinitely in the hope that a clear rationale for it may yet develop from its steadily accumulating history of loss and error. 
   But if in their minds greater costs are self-perpetuating and self-validating, the war can never be concluded as every increase in cost will always necessitate further investments to justify its previous loss.

2. The remedial view 
   They state that we owe the Iraqis an immeasurable debt for our mistakes and must stay in Iraq indefinitely to help Iraq reconstruct from the destruction we have gratuitously wreaked upon them.  Of course, the ones who make this disingenuous argument are generally the same ones who started the war and refuse to admit that it was unjustified. Despite this contradiction in their theory, like sinners at the confessional, they now say we must stay in Iraq as some sort of penance to atone for the sins (for which they personally acknowledge no contrition) of our great leaders no matter how wrong they were and what harm their policies continue to do to the long term interests of the United States. 

3. Deny aid and comfort to the enemy 
   They claim that to stop fighting this self destructive war now (or, presumably, ever) may prove some critic of ours somewhere, who said we wouldn’t stay in Iraq forever, right.  So, they go on, we must keep humiliating ourselves further to disabuse them of all chance of ever being correct in their prediction and hope they will buy into our self-delusional argument that we are winning, even if we are obviously not.  
   This particular quackery is a little like the child who, to prove that poking a stick in his eye doesn’t hurt, must keep sticking the stick in his eye over and over to prove the dullness of his point. We must hope that our willingness to indefinitely stick to a lost cause will show them a positive side about our resolve, which will cancel out the negative point it makes about our intelligence.

4. Peace through war 
   We must stay in Iraq in order to calm the unrest our occupation has created even while continuing the very occupation that is creating all the unrest.  Obviously our occupation fosters unrest rather than reduces it.  This puts our troops in the impossible plight of trying to clear the very waters which their presence is muddying up.
   At what point the national pain we are masochistically inflicting on ourselves becomes more important for us to stop than it is to continue, for sake of any nebulous uncertainty our irrational, self-destructive behavior creates in the minds of our enemies, is not clear in any of these calculations.  Forget the fact that, so far, in return for the negligible aid and comfort our presence provides Iraq, the harm we are doing ourselves seems to outweigh by an incalculable degree any noticeable inconvenience we are causing our enemies.

5. Contain al Qaeda 
   They say that today Iraq, which had no al Qaeda terrorists before our occupation, is now overrun with them, so we must continue our occupation to contain the very problem that our occupation continues to engender.  Trouble is, the inarguable record of our policy so far is that it is making terrorists faster than we can contain them.  
    Though in lucid moments they admit that by every objective standard this war has allowed our enemies’ strength to grow across the board; to recruit, galvanize and proliferate; the stay the course argument has it that in order to keep the contagion from spreading by all means we must persist in the very behavior which causes the disease. 

6. Recoup our losses 
   Therefore, according to their theory, which nicely sums up this section, there is no hope of recouping our losses in Iraq but by continuing to acquire them.  To do this we must send more troops at ever higher costs after an increasingly elusive and euphemistic goal – victory – which can’t be defined, described or envisioned.  Presumably they will know victory when they come upon it and let us know what it was when they have found it.

Section II The Ingenious Second Front Theorem

7.  A second front on terror 
   Forget for a moment that every competent leader in the history of the world has tried with a passion to avoid two front wars.  Our leaders, knowing where the head of the snake of al Qaeda was, chose the clever ruse of outflanking it a thousand miles away by attacking a country where we were told the tail of the snake may have allegedly once passed through (though this later turned out to be false).  We are now busy beating this dusty ground to death with a big stick and calling it a second front against snakes while the real members of al Qaeda are free to plot against us at their leisure in Pakistan.  By all means let’s keep doing this.
   With this strategy, I suppose because of its sheer audacity and farsightedness, we apparently befuddled and outflanked ourselves and have somehow got ourselves cleverly bogged down in Iraq instead of fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan.  To square this seeming insolubly circular logic, proponents of the war have decided that rather than correct their mistakes they would merely redefine them.  They now say that the one time “out” flank, far away from the hideout of our real enemies, is now the “in” flank and has become the main front against them! 

8. The central battle of the war on terror 
   Despite its massive costs and its self-evidently self-destructive irrationality, its authors are unduly proud of the ingeniousness of this odd plan, which has turned, they say, Iraq into the central battle ground against terrorism.  
   Unfortunately, the stateless chaos we have created in Iraq seems to be a laboratory perfectly designed for the incubation of terrorism and the least favorable terrain imaginable for us to fight it. Our presence in Iraq has long since radicalized the entire region against us and become to the next generation of terrorists what Afghanistan under the Soviets was to the birth of the last generation of terrorists (al Qaeda).

9.  If we leave al Qaeda will take over
   By attacking terrorists where none were before our attack on them we have allowed terrorism to spread by luring many shiftless terrorists to the power vacuum we have created in Iraq.  Although they aren’t even Iraqis, but foreigners who have specifically come across Iraq’s porous borders to attack us, we are told we are causing them to be tied down attacking us at the same time we are trying to establish peace and security there.  
   To make matters worse now they say these terrorists which we have drawn into Iraq to fight us, have become so numerous that they will take over control of Iraq unless we stay there indefinitely to keep drawing them in to fight us.  It seems obvious, on the contrary, that since these terrorists have only come to Iraq explicitly to attack us, they will probably leave, or be forced out, when we are.

10. We can’t afford to lose Iraq
    Adherents to this plan insist we can’t afford to lose in Iraq though they are hard pressed to answer the question when we ever “had” Iraq or explain why we can’t afford to lose something we never had or what we can possibly win by staying when we never should have gone to Iraq in the first place. Be that as it may, we are told that this battle must be won in Iraq, though it should never have been fought there and fighting terrorists there would seem to run directly counter to our main plan of securing Iraq for peace and democracy.

Section III We have nothing but fear to fear,
                   but that’s more than enough for us

11. It will get worse if we go
   The same polemicists who fearfully started a war for no clear or defensible purpose claim we have to keep fighting it for fear of what would happen if we stop.  They insist that our leaving Iraq will be worse for Iraq than if we stay - though all the evidence leads directly to the contrary conclusion and the majority of Iraqis want us to go.  They say that our leaving Iraq will somehow be harmful for America - though the weight of all available evidence leans self-evidently in the opposite direction and the majority of Americans disagree. 
    Notably, by this time, it must be pointed out that the only ones in favor of our continuing engagement in Iraq are the failing politicians of both countries who are being propped up by its continuation.

12. Living in Fear 
   Before the war, the President said, “We cannot live in fear (of Saddam Hussein) any longer.”  Many braver Americans were left to ask themselves, if the United States is terrified of Saddam Hussein, one of the weakest and most incompetent blowhards known, who in the world is the President not afraid of?  After we were told to be afraid when Saddam was in charge, we are urged to be even more petrified now that he is gone.  Is this really progress?        
   Shrewd observers are free to ask themselves if the same irrational fear that got us into Iraq isn’t now just being retooled and used again to keep us there.  Since the first fear was proven to be entirely unjustified, why should the new fears of these institutional wolf criers be thought of as any more credible now?  The deeper question is, is there any eventuality outside of psychiatry that might free the feverish hearts of these timid people in charge of our nation from the tyranny of the fearful workings of their own tortured imaginations?  Apparently not.

13. If we leave we will have to return
    Proponents of the war threaten that because they have made such a complete mess of the war in Iraq, that if we leave we will only have to return later to clean up the mess they have already made.  Though what we will have to return to do which we haven’t been able to do there already, especially when there was never any national interest for us to be there in the first place, is not specified.  How we can help prevent the spread of a civil war that our invasion has created or help stabilize a region later that our occupation has destabilized is left obscure.

14. The terrorists will follow us home 
   These bravehearts say that those who are fighting us in a country we have illicitly invaded (according to our own traditional standards of behavior) will “follow us home” and attack us in our homes if we leave off attacking them in theirs, though there is no evidence to support such wildly fearful contentions.  What are they, puppies?  What are we going to do, make room on the plane for them? 

15. No further attacks on the US since 9/11 
   They are quick to attribute the fact that there have been no further attacks on the United States since 2001 to the diversion we have created with the entirely ancillary war in Iraq, though there is no evidence whatsoever to support this contention.  
   In fact, other than a few isolated terror attacks, which we are much more vigilant in protecting ourselves from than before 9/11, by individual terror cells of al Qaeda members based along the Afghanistan - Pakistan border areas, we have never been under any real outside terror threat by Islamic forces at all.  Iraqis have never evinced any tendency or desire and haven’t the means to attack us. 

16. Better Americans dying in Iraq than in the US
    The war’s supporters suggest a sort of ghoulishly superstitious quid pro quo, that Americans dying uselessly in Iraq somehow insulate Americans from dying in terror attacks here, though there is no evidence whatsoever to support this either.  This suggests that American lives being sacrificed in Iraq somehow are worth less than American lives at home though the human costs to the nation are the same (and the actual costs to the taxpayer far greater) and no rational American should accept Americans being needlessly killed by terrorists anywhere.
   On the contrary, as shown earlier, despite a general, growing, subterranean, aggravation of our unpopularity in the world, which they expect us to consider a plus, there is no evidence that our occupation of Iraq, which weakens us and divides our attention while allowing al Qaeda to strengthen, has contributed in any way to suppressing al Qaeda.  As usual, the opposite contention may be made much more persuasively.  Therefore, if anything, our continuing attack on Iraq makes an eventual attack on us by an ever strengthening al Qaeda more possible not less.  Still, cowards of the war continue to hide their fears behind the bravery of our troops in the field.

17. The civil war in Iraq will spread
    Next they shrilly caution that the civil war our invasion has perpetrated in Iraq will further regionalize upon our absence, and predict all manner of catastrophe, up to and including Armageddon, if we leave.  This ignores the fact that not only has our invasion led to the civil war but it is the huge military presence of the world’s only superpower which has elevated this conflict to global stature. Presumably, once we leave, the civil war will fall back to its proper, predictable proportions and become a true civil war for the future of Iraq contained within Iraq, rather than a regional conflict of international scope which it has become due to our interference.

18. We must stay to keep things from getting worse 
   They claim that we must remain in place to keep the situation we have made bad from growing worse, even though every day we have been there it has done just that.  They refuse to say how by doing more of the same things which have given us these negative results, we will be doing anything but continuing to provoke, prolong and make a bad situation continuously worse.  
   They say we cannot leave Iraq until it can govern itself, though self-determination in a country enduring an unpopular occupation is a contradiction in terms, thus making our leaving impossible. To insist we can’t leave Iraq until peace spontaneously occurs has the effect of delivering effective control of our policy into the hands of our enemies. For as long as some force within Iraq wants to attack Americans we will stay and let them do it, and will not leave until they stop.  This means that we can’t pull out our troops until peace occurs and obviously peace can’t occur until we’ve pulled our troops out. 

19.  Occupation as an end in itself
   Our occupation is not only the elephant in the room, it is the elephant in the room denying it is in the room.  Realist opponents of the war perceive that our military occupation of Iraq is one of the primary problems standing in the way of the successful consummation of the policy the occupation is meant to achieve. In fact, our occupation of Iraq is the knife in the heart of the consummation of all our policy aims, not only in the region, but in the world. Yet diehard adherents insist that we must keep the knife plunged into the heart of the Middle East and even twist it from time to time to keep the bleeding from growing worse.
 
Section IV Gall is divided into three parts

20. Criticism is the same as defeat 
   The proponents of the war declare that anyone who dares take issue with their massive policy mistakes somehow wrests ultimate responsibility for these mistakes away from them.  Therefore, in this particularly casuistic twist of logic, to criticize policies which cannot possibly succeed in order to amend or end them, somehow ensures that these failing policies will fail.  This neatly absolves the ones who engineered the catastrophe from any responsibility for their own behavior.  You’re damned if they do and you’re damned if they don’t.  In their own minds then, their own fears, incompetence and lack of a coherent policy have absolutely nothing to do with the defeat they have led us directly into.  Instead they blame the fecklessness of the American people for not following firmly behind this President as he marches us steadfastly onward toward certain, deadly and increasingly unequivocal defeat.

21. Shut up and trust your leaders
    Instead, we are urged to continue to blindly believe in the theories and plans and excuses of the very people who have been uniformly wrong in Iraq and continue to ignore those who have always been correct.  To show our mettle in error, the self-serving proponents say, we must continue to pursue this lost cause until it is too late to extricate ourselves gracefully from the obvious catastrophe we are perpetrating and are driven ignominiously from Iraq on terms other than our own. 
We are told that complete defeat is the only possible alternative to complete victory.  Since they admit to no middle ground this means that tactical retreat is unacceptable and only full strategic defeat is worthy of us as a great power.  At the same time, they equate exercising logic or applying lessons of history or even factoring our own best interests and traditions into the strategic equation, to cowardice.

22. Patriotism is a one way street
    Finally, with an abundance of grandly unjustified self-righteousness they claim that those who want to bring our troops home safely and soon don’t really care about the safety and well being of our troops.  At least not nearly as much as those who sent them into harm’s way unnecessarily, have left them there for years without enough troops to complete the mission they were given and would gladly leave them there indefinitely if they could get away with it.  
   They say those opposed to the war are less patriotic than those who are for it despite all the irretrievable magnitude of the one-way costs it has inflicted upon us.  
   They say that they who imagined enemies where none existed, attacked an unarmed nation, were so incompetent that they have largely lost this war and now are so afraid of the results of their actions and too intellectually dishonest and paralyzed with whimpering fear to leave, are tougher and braver than those well adjusted and knowledgeable and wise enough not to have made any of these mistakes in the first place.
    (Note: for the record, to be fair, critics of the war contend that the military actually handily won the war they were sent there to fight and the American people were led to believe was necessary - three years ago.  We disarmed Iraq, engaged in regime change and gave the Iraqis a legitimate chance at good self government.  They claim the war has since been lost by the poor work of civilians in Washington who have continued to redefine success beyond the possibility of ever being able to be achieved.  In this way the good work of our military has been wasted and political defeat in Iraq has been unaccountably snatched from the jaws of military victory.)

Section V When in doubt- escalate

23. Our only strategy is no strategy at all 
   Everything that has been achieved in Iraq has been achieved through the institution of timetables rigorously adhered to.  Yet the President refuses to sanction or even discuss any timetable for withdrawal or guideline or exit strategy to get our troops safely home, as if these were an enemy of strategy when, of course, they are both its cornerstone and its culmination.  Not incidentally, the flipside of a timetable would be clear benchmarks for the government of Iraq to live up to. 
Unfortunately, the absence of both a timetable and benchmarks leads to us having no policy at all.  This creates uncertainty on all sides in a place where certainty is what’s needed most of all.  This has given us the worst of all possible worlds by playing to the basest instincts of all the participants while at the same time levying no responsibilities on the Iraqis themselves to take any responsibility for their own actions.
   Our enemies are free to draw the conclusion that we will stay as permanent occupiers unless we are compelled to get out.  No exit strategy encourages them to fight us harder and more viciously to force us to leave.  On the other hand, those who don’t believe in our commitment to open ended occupation are inclined to wait us out anyway, violently jockeying for position against their enemies in the meantime.  Both of these extremes, in this the worst of all possible worlds, are exactly what seems to be happening.

24. The secret reason for continuing the war
    But consider that perhaps the real reasons we invaded Iraq have never quite been made explicit to the people of the United States. If nothing else has been learned by now, it is that it is a mistake to take our leaders literally and so much at their word.  Obviously, the hard facts of the reason to go to war were exaggerated and misrepresented.  But the hidden intentions and the unspoken fantasies which infused and still justify (to their minds) these exaggerations have never been made clear.
   There seems to have been some sort of empire building fantasy alive in the minds of the instigators of this incursion that was meant to be a precursor or paradigm of future behavior.  This has to do with dominating the region or controlling the oil or preaching democracy at the point of a gun in some sort of latter day imperialistic, hegemonistic or neo-colonialist dream.  Surely there are some elements of this fantasy still to be found in the President’s strangely dissociative use of the word “victory” in connection to the war in Iraq.
   In this sense Iraq seems to play handmaiden in gloved fist with some of the more farfetched underpinnings of the Bush doctrine.  But we’ll never know. They have led to such ruinous policy that no one is liable to admit to these secret aims now.  That’s too bad, for once illusions are brought out into the open they may be effectively refuted, but if kept inside and secret they retain their potency for warping policy irrationally and continuing to do us harm.  
   It is this administration’s own penchant for secrecy and desire to thwart democracy which seems to have unhinged everything else they’ve done.  If the real reasons for the war and honest intelligence given to the people prior to the war the public never would have supported it.  We were led to war on a lie which continues to this day.  And for those who think that this administration will surely learn from their mistakes someday, always remember that it is good to never underestimate the tenacity with which a small mind will hold on to a bad idea.  Whatever the truth of their original intentions, in the execution and maintenance of this policy, they have clearly elevated folly to levels unprecedented in our history.

25. “Victory” at all costs
    In the vain hopes and failed policies and unwarranted fears which have driven this war we irrationally persist. Yet in a war started for no reason and continued for no purpose, the Commander in Chief has decided to escalate and embed us further into the web of his failed policies which he still rather inanely mischaracterizes as “winning”.
   First we attacked an unarmed country because our brave leaders were afraid it was about to attack us and then, through every manner and means of dereliction and lack of planning for contingencies if things didn’t go optimally well, they have actually managed to bring the greatest military power in the world to the verge of defeat against the weakest nation in the world.  This takes rare gifts. 
After enduring this for four years of total and bitter loss, they claim there is no alternative but to continue like yoked and plodding oxen down the same wrong road to certain defeat. Primarily in order to save the lost faces of our brave and wise leaders who led us into this debacle we must continue to box ourselves into to a conundrum which they are not smart enough to extricate us from.  They call this pursuit of their implausible and fleeting fantasies victory.  This victory though, is a term in this instance which, even if achieved, contains within it no hope of ever justifying the costs necessary to achieve it.  And which we all, in our hearts of hearts, know and have known for years can’t be achieved in the spirit in which we’re seeking it. 
-------------------------------------------------------------

   There you have it.  Twenty-five perfectly clear reasons for the war must go on indefinitely.  I think we must confess to a certain admiration here at their profusion. Admittedly these reasons may sometimes seem strained, circular, desperate, self-refuting and even disingenuous.  And if there seems to be a hollowness to their very core, and a shallowness of wishful thinking and fanciful or even fearful anticipation washing around them all sides, how can you be surprised?  
   Because no war ever been fought for such a collection of impregnably oblique rationales as this. But since 9/11, the excuse goes, the old verities no longer apply.  The old standards of judging success or failure have apparently been reversed.  So we must continue fighting this war in the hopes that some reason for fighting it may still arise from it.  
   Historically, reasons for fighting a just war are generally very clear, easy and succinct.  Therefore, far from inspiring confidence, the very fact that its proponents go to such extremes lengths to marshal such a wide ranging and changeable accumulation of often self contradictory rationales for continuing this war on its current basis, speak not to the strength of their purpose but to it fatal weakness.   
    Never has a war been fought to such poor purpose, exhorted by such a nebulously oozing list of questionable rationales, with only a revolving game show like wheel of spin to support it.  Mix and match these twenty-six reasons to your heart’s content, when you look behind the gauzy, oz-like, drapery, there is still no there there anywhere. Fighting unnecessary wars to assuage phony fears or avenge false honor, or in search of new or fading glories, is the most dubiously self destructive thing a nation can possibly do.  History is littered with the fading bones of their carcasses. 
   And when you add in the gutting of international law, the abrogation of the Geneva Convention, the Abu Grahaib and Guantanamo Bay scandals, the suspension of civil liberties and erosion of privacy of Americans, the ongoing assault on the system of checks and balances within our government, the fervent politicization of the war to divide the country against itself, and the studied erosion of our standing as the world’s moral and political leader, then costs of this war which can’t possibly be won but only continued are magnified to historic proportions.  In this war of choice against Iraq we have the most odious and malignant war in our long history.  And in return there has been not one measurable iota of benefit accruing to the nation from it.

   So what has our policy come to now?  Given that everything up to now with this policy is in as deep a deficit as is imaginable, as deep a deficit as their budgets, diplomatically, ethically, militarily, fiscally and according to the demands of the war on terror, what else do we have to look forward to in the open ended continuation of this war?
   First, today the policy is being pursued almost as dishonestly as it was begun.  We still have no exit strategy, no way in the world to get our troops home safely. As bizarre as it seems for the world’s greatest power we have actually abdicated control of our own policy and placed it into the hands of the good people of Iraq, many of whom don’t reciprocate our affection for them.  
   Our “new” policy is still being guided by the same great minds who butchered the old policy.  The impending “defeat” in Iraq is not a real defeat at all, but an intellectual conundrum of our own devising.  Unfortunately, the navigators who led us into this swamp, since they are still using the same erroneous and outdated coordinates they used to lead us into it, will never be smart enough to navigate us back out. 
   Based on the fearful imaginations and limited ethics and the lack of capability of our leadership, we are still being led by the lowest common denominator of our society’s wisdom and ethics, carefully wrapped around the sum of all our fears.  Traveling the well worn path to complete failure, we are trying to staunch the worst results of our policy from even more catastrophic destruction, by adding to it, digging our way out of the hole we’ve dug by continuing to dig us in deeper.  In the minds of the irrepressible supporters of this war, that is more than reason enough to continue to chase diminishing returns with compounding costs.  
   By now, even all our secondary reasons for fighting this misbegotten war have proven as fanciful, naïve and untrue as our initial reasons for invading Iraq were dishonest.  Obviously we are no longer counting on creating a better Iraq, a perfect democracy or transforming the region.  Any potential benefit ever conceived by the war’s proponents have long since been completely overwhelmed and watered down by across the board losses to our interests.  Now proponents of the war are only talking about painting a gloss of temporary uncertainty atop a volcano and trying to avoid the worst results imaginable rather than achieve the best.  The glass of opportunity in Iraq is more than half empty and draining fast. 

    In the face of all this chaos, Congress allows the nation to twist in the wind along the same old party lines. Those in favor of the war from the beginning are counseling stay the course, trust the administration and keep pursing variants of tactics that have previously failed to produce the desired results.  Unfortunately, this means that these recumbent members of Congress will have done nothing before, during or ever to control the outcome of this war. 
    They began with no coherent debate or study and immediately ceded their constitutional authority and responsibility to declare war away as soon as they had the opportunity.  Then they have done nothing for four years but watch like vaguely disinterested tourists as everyday the war has grown worse.  And now, though many privately say they are opposed to the war their own bad actions and irresponsible omissions are responsible for, they say it is far too late to intervene with an actual policy in this war.  They claim that their craven authorization of blanket authority to allow the administrative branch carte blanche over all aspects previously thought to the responsibility of the legislative branch, such as oversight and funding, was abdicated by them in advance and in perpetuity, or for the life of this administration or their own careers, which ever should come first.  
    Therefore these representatives of the people, the only ones we have, after all, say they should never burden the most burning issue of the day with actual thoughtful democratic representation.  These Pilates of inactivity have basically sold out the country for party, cowardice, campaign patronage and a handful of empty political trinkets, bribes and promises.  Surely they have compiled the worst record in office of any Congressional party in American history. They have achieved rare distinction with an unblemished record of complete dereliction, dishonesty, corruption and do-nothingism, never before approached.
    Congressional supporters of the war seem discomfortingly comfortable that even when wrong the Commander in Chief must be allowed to continue an extra-constitutional war (only made extra-constitutional by their own unwillingness to wield the authority the Constitution demands they exercise over the nation’s business) in favor of the party favor, no matter how much their inactivity disserves the country.
   Clearly an unnecessary war born on the wings of the fear-mongering imaginations and machinations of our leaders will take far more courage for them to stop than it was to start, much less to continue.  Where it takes heart, guts, wisdom and courage to admit your mistakes and correct them, it takes a common fool and complete coward to continue them.  Any fool can start a war it takes a hero to end one.

         “Wisdom commonly makes men scrupulous which explains why… 
         they live unheeded and inglorious (lives) as hated men.
         The fool, on the other hand, seems to live in a profusion of wealth 
         and sometimes is the head of state.
         (In such a state)…It is the fools that flourish in every way.”

In Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) 
Erasmus    1517