Monday, November 27, 2006

"Victory or Death"

In case you were wondering if Newt Gingrich was still batshit crazy, the answer is yes (hat tip: Eric Kleefeld).

In a column for Human Events, he invokes Washington and the Battle of Trenton against the (relative) realists on Iraq. Gingrich, ever the half-bright student of history, reduces it all to a slogan:

But the most telling sign of Washington's mood as he embarked on the mission was his choice of a password. His men said "victory or death" to identify themselves.
And after doling out his deathless advice on the Baker-Hamilton commission report, he--never one for subtlety--again drives home the slogan:
These 11 steps would be a powerful basis on which to move forward in Iraq and in the world. What's more, they reflect the spirit of Gen. Washington when he chose "victory or death" as the motto of the campaign that led to the founding of America despite overwhelming odds.
Now, there are parties in Iraq for whom 'victory or death' may actually make sense. (In fact, that's part of the problem.) Here's the thing: the US isn't one of them. We don't have as much at stake (what we do have at stake is pretty much what we choose to put at stake, i.e., the lives of our troops), and 'victory' (from our perspective) isn't something that can even be defined any more. Only in the fevered dreams of the wingnut hawks does something like 'victory or death' make anything resembling sense in this situation.

We can't win. We can't even figure out what winning means. The people who got us into this mess have come to define winning as not losing, and they define not losing as not leaving. In other words, the alternative to defeat is the open-ended expenditure of American lives for no discernible goal. (Don't get me wrong: defeat will be bad, very very bad. The measure of this catastrophe is how much better that particular catastrophic outcome is than the catastrophic outcome of staying indefinitely.) And still the hawks like Gingrich cling to childish slogans like 'victory or death' that have no conceivable relation to the realities of the war they think they want to win. And still there are people who take this shit seriously.

So yes, Newt Gingrich is still batshit crazy. I have some hope that the rest of the country is no longer following him toward the asylum.

[That's all, folks]