Still Being Taken Seriously

An interesting aspect of conservatism is the internal belief that they are never wrong; their failings are not the fault of conservatism or politicians, but rather abstract factors (such as the media). They'll get it right the next time, they swear! This is definitely true of their Iraq failures, as we are constantly reminded that liberals were still wrong to oppose the war, they were still right to start it, and that it all would've worked out fine... if only it didn't.

Today the usual pundits called for one last escalation of the Iraq war. Read it and weep:

-Glenn Greenwald: Rich Lowry, Serious Foreign Policy Expert, announces his serious plan for victory in Iraq
-Atrios: If at first, second, third ... nevermind, but this time We'll Succeed!
-Think Progress: National Review Editor: ‘People Would React Favorably’ To Escalating Troop Levels In Iraq

This tired "if we just escalate the war a little more and really commit to it, we'll turn the corner for sure this time" rhetoric is exactly the same sort of backwards logic that kept the United States mired in the Vietnam quagmire for well over a dozen years. See if you can find audio of the 1966 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Vietnam in which many of the war's initial supporters- such as Sen. Fulbright- expressed strong doubts that this had all been the wise choice. Regardless, the President and Congress stayed the course, to use Bush's words, and countless thousands of Americans continued to die for nothing until seven years later when the Nixon/Ford administration did the only thing they could do and pulled the plug on that war. That war was unwinnable. The lesson we learned from it wasn't that we should've stuck it out longer, as some delusional conservatives now argue, but that our national interests would've been better served if we had ended it much, much earlier. As Sen. Clark told the Secretary of State in those 1966 hearings- "I would hope very much that we are going to stop escalating this war any further. I think it was about a year ago that you told me we had lots of wiggle room. I think we're running out of wiggle room."