Someone last night on MSNBC, maybe it was Pat Buchanan, made a great point about why the administration and the Iraqi government are so adamant that the press does not call the carnage in Iraq a ‘civil war’. He said (paraphrasing), “If it is a civil war then we are using the exact wrong tactics. If it were an insurgency then we would be right to support the government and help train their police and armed forces. But if it is a civil war then we would do the opposite. We would not empower one side, but try to get all sides to sit down and settle their differences. If we start calling it a civil war then it undermines our whole strategy.”
That’s a very astute observation with a highly invalid conclusion. What we call the carnage will not undermine or bolster our strategy. A strategy does not succeed or fail based on semantics. But conceding that Iraq had devolved into civil war would require an honest and responsible government and a competent military leadership to change our current strategy. The administration still does not seem inclined to do that.
The reason we keep hearing rumblings about talking to Iran and Syria is because that is the only hope for getting the different parties to negotiate rather than assassinate each other.
Here’s another interesting tidbit:
Saudi Arabia is so concerned about the damage that the conflict in Iraq is doing across the region that it basically summoned Vice President Cheney for talks over the weekend, according to U.S. officials and foreign diplomats. The visit was originally portrayed as U.S. outreach to its oil-rich Arab ally.
Is this one of those ‘Dick, we need to talk’ moments? Is Saudi Arabia breaking up with Dick Cheney? I wonder if he will get the old, “it’s not you, it’s your chimplike sidekick” speeches?
It’s all coming apart at the seams. The one thing the Democrats must not do is allow this war, and the responsibility for this war, to become part of their shared burden. The Democrats were elected to get us out. That is where they can offer the cover of bipartisanship. Further enabling this war is wrong morally and politically. Bush, Cheney, and their congressional allies need to own it completely and they need to be held accountable for it. The Greeks exiled their failed generals. We should prosecute ours. It’s not what the Washington Post wants us to do, but it is the only right thing to do. And I don’t want to hear anything about how they had ‘noble intentions’. They didn’t. And everyone knows it.