We Win, They Lose

See, the Victory Caucus concept had always struck me as possibly the dumbest thing ever, but it's totally blown away by We Win, They Lose. I mean, just take the basic reference:

When it came to defeating the Soviets, Ronald Reagan made it simple: "We win, they lose." Now more than ever, the defeatists in Congress must hear that same message. America will never surrender.

I mean, which "they" are we trying to beat in Iraq? What would winning look like? If Nouri al-Maliki succeeds in consolidating control over Iraq more firmly, leaving a coalition of Iranian-backed Shiite parties firmly in charge, does that mean "we" win? What would we have won?

Comments

a simple substitution of terms:

"we" = GOP
"they" = Dems

makes all of your questions trivially easy to answer.

Posted by cleek | June 7, 2007 4:05 PM

How infantile can the Republicans' rhetoric get?

The next time Fox hosts a Republican debate, I'm looking for this question from Brit Hume:

"Three shopping centers near major U.S. cities have been hit by suicide bombers. Hundreds are dead, thousands injured. U.S. intelligence believes that a fourth attacker is planning to purchase a semi-automatic weapon and shoot into a popular tourist location. A vaguely Muslim-ish looking man is behing you in line at the gun shop. What is the meanest looking face you can muster to show the potential terrorist the U.S. means business."

Posted by Brian | June 7, 2007 4:19 PM

This is somewhat old. It came out about a day before Paris Hilton was sentenced to jail. By the end of the week one of the petitions to Arnold to pardon her had it beat by 10,000 signatures. It's only gotten about 500 since I last checked a month ago.

Posted by neil | June 7, 2007 4:24 PM

You know for all of the nutty posturing of the current president of the Islamic Republic, Twelver Shi'ites are much less of a threat to humanity in general than Salafis. After all, to take a random example, it wasn't Shi'ites who decided that it would be a good idea to invade Russia with 1200 men in 1999. Even when they've fought the U.S. they tend to fight against military people rather than exulting in the mass slaughter of civilians.

Posted by Andrew R. | June 7, 2007 4:28 PM

Is it all that clear now that Russia "lost" in a complete sense and the US "won." Putin sure doesn't act like a defeated man. Bush sure isn't treated as the all-conquering-hero. Geopolitical moments are fleeting. Reagan is dead and his policies served a different era.

Posted by Scott Ferguson | June 7, 2007 4:50 PM

Isn't this bullshit best dealt with by defining "winning" in terms of what's best for the American people?

In which case, wouldn't "victory" be defined as beating the living shit out of the Victory Caucus?

Posted by Don Williams | June 7, 2007 5:07 PM

Did Reagan win when he made that deal with the Iranians, or was it when he withdrew all American troops from Beirut?

Posted by MDtoMN | June 7, 2007 5:14 PM

'We' win when 'we' build large military bases there to defend 'our' oil and threaten ('contain') Iran.

Posted by abb1 | June 7, 2007 5:36 PM

Blame Glen Reynolds.

http://americanfootprints.com/drupal/node/3506

Posted by David Tomlin | June 7, 2007 5:40 PM

The all time best was 'No End but Victory'created by trevino in his heyday. At its inception the phrase refered to Iraq, but about six weeks in that super genius realized what a clusterfuck Iraq was and "repurposed" his site to the 'war on terra.' What a fucking douche.

Posted by Tacitus liked boys | June 7, 2007 9:25 PM

I mean, which "they" are we trying to beat in Iraq?

The "they" that will attack us "here" if "we" don't "defeat" "them" "there."

Posted by James Gary | June 7, 2007 10:53 PM

A certain segment of the American public has never gotten over Vietnam, blames that defeat upon a "stab in the back," and essentially wanted the Iraq War as a showcase to demonstrate that a "kick butt" military could, in fact. Win.

The article, Iraq: Yes, Rambo, you get to win this time, by Julian Delasantellis does a good job of outlining this thesis.

According to Delasantellis:

Apparently, for the veterans' advocates lobbying for the perpetuation of the war, and perhaps for much of the United States as a whole, the war has taken on a meaning and significance way beyond anything that is actually happening on the carnage-drenched streets of Baghdad or Diyala province.
....
But as the United States feathered its hair and discoed its way through the late 1970s to the early 1980s, a gnawing ache grew and metastasized in the national consciousness. The US lost a war. The US lost its first war. This was unacceptable. Somehow, the truth of the Vietnam War had to be disposed of down the memory hole.
....
On May 28, 1984, at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, president Ronald Reagan said, "Those Americans who went to Vietnam fought for freedom, a truly noble cause ... This battle was lost not by those brave American and South Vietnamese troops who were waging it but by political misjudgments and strategic failure at the highest levels of government."
....
More important, the war was not lost by the troops - they actually won the fight - but by other forces in society: first, thegovernment, then other societal forces.
The manhunt for the real losers of the Vietnam War was on.
....
Rambo: First Blood Part II and other POW-rescue movies indulged the fantasy of going back to Vietnam and blowing to pieces as many Vietnamese as possible, preferably but not necessarily limited to communists. Thereby they were winning the war, and not having to be concerned with the messy winning of the "hearts and minds" that posed such a challenge in the actual war.

Beyond that, there arose a bewildering array of other cultural illustrations of a US desire to change the actual historical record and result of the Vietnam War, what Gibson called the "New War". Among these were the rise of suburban weekend warriors playing paintball, the idolization of mercenaries, and an innumerable parade of pulpy paperback novels and B-grade movies that featured brave Vietnam veterans brutally battling varied assortments of drug dealers, treacherously spineless bureaucrats, and, especially, the anti-war left.
....
If anything, the "lessons" taken from September 11, 2001, had only reinforced Vietnam revisionism. Even though there were absolutely no points of ideological commonality, and more than 30 years of history, between the actual enemies involved, atheist Vietnamese communists and Islamic fundamentalist Arabs, a consensus seemed to develop that the attacks represented a total discrediting of a central tenet of the Vietnam anti-war movement, that peace was a possible, or maybe even a desirable, national policy objective.
....
Up until recently, there were few more profitable businesses to be engaged in in the US than producing those once-ubiquitous "support the troops" magnetic ribbons that so many US vehicles displayed, their very existence saying that the people were going to "support the troops" in this war, because they didn't in the last.

On the few occasions when right-wing radio talk shows stop baying for the blood of Mexican immigrants and talk about the war, the discussion inevitably fades away from today's actual war to the theme that opposition to the war is leading to a situation "just like Vietnam". This is even though no effective peace movement has ever really developed for this war; most of it disappeared when an exhausted and dispirited Cindy Sheehan announced a withdrawal from her anti-war activities last week.
....
This is the real quest for which today the United States battles in Mesopotamia. For the veterans of Vietnam, a decisive victory in Iraq would allow them somehow to validate the mindless pain and carnage of Vietnam - we should have won, this proves we could have, too. For the country as a whole, Iraq is a chance to return to the better US of the past, before Watergate, and Monicagate and all the social pathologies (drugs, divorce, sexual licentiousness, lack of proper respect for authority, etc) that conservative commentators such as Robert Bork, William Bennett and David Horowitz claim infected US society as a result of the counterculture that grew out of the anti-war movement of the 1960s.
....

Posted by Duncan Kinder | June 8, 2007 1:37 AM

Just how much more infantile can the rhetoric get?

I think I'm going to register me some domains before the rush - ones like waaaahh.com, googoo.net, and demshavecooties.org. So far, there's no way to include "stamping your tiny foot while going red in the face and smearing yourself with your own excrement" in the DNS namespace, but I hope to submit a draft to the IETF soon enough.

Posted by Alex | June 8, 2007 5:10 AM