Nero Imperator 0

Josh Marshall today looked at delusion now growing among certain segments of the population that opponents of the War in Iraq have somehow “lost the war.”

. . . As the dead-ender right’s plans and dreams about Iraq come under greater and greater strain from the alternative universe of reality, and as the president’s popularity wanes further and further, there’s a growing tendency for them to think about and write about domestic American politics in terms of violence and extra-constitutional action.

A minor example of this I noticed just yesterday on the Powerline Blog, where Sen. Schumer’s (D-NY) call to remove the “presumption of confirmation” from President Bush’s court appointments a “coup”. “Is This a coup? If not, what is it?” ran the headline to the post.

As the war for faux-democracy looks more and more like a debacle, the lure of authoritarianism at home becomes greater and greater for the war’s dead-end defenders. And as redeployment looks more and more likely, they have to keep raising the stakes on the consequences of doing so. Apparently our whole future, our honor, destiny, certainly our safety from the Iraqi insurgents who will restart the insurgency in the US — all of this is in the balance. The stakes must keep rising because that is, paradoxically, the only way for them to avoid taking responsibility for their failures. And cowardice that militant, in a faction within the body politic, is dangerous for the rest of us.

And in an interview today, Thomas Ricks, Washington Post reporter and author of Fiasco, remarked on the same phenomenon.

(According to the website, audio of the interview will be available around 6 p. m. today. It was a wide-ranging discussion including interesting phone calls from several veterans of the Wars in Iraq.)

After Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks published an account of the Iraq war last year, his inbox began overflowing with emails from men and women in the service. With new insight about the conditions on the ground, Ricks updated his book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.

Of course, the War in Iraq is lost.

And the persons who lost it? The Current Federal Administration.

It was a war that was not provoked from without, but rather, one that was marketed to the American people like a tube of toothpaste infused with antifreeze, corrupt from its inception.

And not one of the sliding scale of goals that the Current Federal Administration has announced over the years, as the effort slipped deeper into chaos and bloodshed, will be achieved, whatever the military outcome of the war.

And a war that achieves none of its goals is, ipso facto, lost.

The initial goal, the sales slogan, as it were, of finding weapons of mass destruction could not be achieved because there were no weapons of mass destruction (and remember how the Current Federal Administration rushed the deadlines for inspection as it became clearer and clearer that the weapons inspectors would find no weapons to inspect?)

And when that slogan proved hollow, a new slogan, “Bringing Democracy to the Middle East,” was run up the flagpole (while at the same time the Current Federal Administration attacks democracy at home.)

And it just hung limply there. Despite the Current Federal Administrator’s rhetoric, there is no “young democracy” growing in Iraq. A thousand flowers did not bloom.

There is an administration whose authority is limited to the Green Zone, which is incapable of taking action, which would not exist and cannot continue exist without force of American arms, while at the same time it defies its protectors.

So now the marketing slogan is “bring stability to the Middle East.”

So how did the Current Federal Administration lose the war?

They started it with lies. It was likely doomed from the start because of that.

Then they threw lie after lie at it.

They pursued it incompetently, making policy decisions based on their ideas of how the world should be, rather than how the world is. Perhaps the best example of this was their belief that, when Saddam Hussein toppled, American style democracy (which they undermine here) would just spring, full-blown, out of the desert soil, like Venus from the mind of Zeus.

So what did happen? War, war, and more war. And as the war deepened, Imperator fiddled about, playing the same tune over and over on his violin: “Stay the course. Stay the course.”

Any suggestions to change the course were disregarded.

And now his ship of state, our state, is trapped in the ice.

It is the captain that wrecked this ship, by steering it in the fog–the fog of his and his cohorts delusions–and by disregarding the advice of those who saw clearly.

There is no blame to those who knew from the beginning he charted the wrong course, or even from those who recognized later on during the voyage that the heading was wrong.

Only the hypocrisy–or perhaps it is the broken dreams–of what Mr. Marshall refers to as the “Dead Enders” prevents them from seeing that.