MemeMachineGo!

Around Nov. 2004, I was saying that the one silver lining to Bush’s victory is that the Republicans would be stuck with the responsibility for the quagmire Iraq so obviously already was. Had Kerry been elected, naturally the whole outcome would be Democrats’ fault (because it had been going so well up to then.)

But, y’know, I was wrong and TBogg is right.

With every American death, with every request for more billions for Iraq, the American public that initially supported the war starts to edge away from it as if it smells like last weeks garbage. Military recruiters are currently doing everything short of shanghaiing high school kids and they still can’t meet their recruitment goals. Soldiers are being kept in Iraq for too long. We are running out of money, soldiers, patience, and more importantly, the will to fight in Iraq.

Which is exactly what happened in Viet Nam.

So when we finally bow down to public opinion and admit defeat (only we won’t admit defeat…we’ll just call it a tie) and pull out of Iraq, and the power vacuum that ensues results in tribal warfare and more death and destruction, who do you think the rightwing echo chamber is going to blame? Not the neo-cons who sent us on this fools errand. Not the generals who were whistling past the graveyard when they should have been telling Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to fuck off. Not the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who waved their little flags and their well-thumbed copies of Sun Tzu and pointed out that it looked a hell of a lot easier on the Risk board.

No. They’re going to blame us because we didn’t wear little flag lapel pins and slap yellow ribbon magnetic stickers on our SUV’s and we subverted the cause of democracy in the Middle East and that’s why 1600 and counting American soldiers are dead, and the blood of every Iraqi killed in the wake of our leaving will be on our hands.

And it’s all because we didn’t stop them before they killed again.