Now With Substance

For a more substantive take on today's edition of Michael O'Hanlon's "prominent newspapers can't stop letting me write op-eds" gravy train, read Ilan Goldenberg's detailed effort at a rebuttal. To sum up Ilan's points, however, I would just note that it's hard to rebut an argument that doesn't feature a real argument. O'Hanlon lists six things that it would be good to see happen in Iraq, and then proclaims those six things to be a good reason to keep 140,000 American troops in Iraq at a cost of billions per week for the next 90 weeks or so, but he doesn't explain why doing this will actually help resolve any of those problems.

This, though, has been the time-honored debating ploy of the Iraq forever crowd for years. I recall in 2005 when the troops needed to stay or else there would be ethnic cleansing. So the troops stayed and guess what happened in 2006? Ethnic cleansing. Then when the ethnic cleansing ended, that proved our deployment was working and had to be continued.

U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. William Greer

Comments

Then when the ethnic cleansing ended, that proved our deployment was working and had to be continued.

Well, once the village was destroyed, it was saved. And if it was saved then the strategy worked.

It's all very logical.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | April 16, 2008 4:33 PM

No matter the topic or how often they are wrong, the right-wingnuts have an infinite capacity for justification. Look at Bush's sliding Reasonometer (tm) for staying in Iraq. Budget surplus? Tax cuts! Budget deficit? Tax cuts!

I guess life is much simpler when you know the answer in advance and don't have to let those pesky facts or reality clutter your "thinking".

Posted by LFC | April 16, 2008 4:57 PM

Jon Stewart covered this the other night. Every time BushCo. tells you all the horrific things that will happen if we leave Iraq, substitute "If we invade Iraq" at the beginning and you will get, as Jon says, an amazing insight into the present.

Posted by scottreads | April 16, 2008 5:03 PM

Get used to the war. We'll be in Iraq 10 years from now. Any prez who tries to exit will face AIPAC, Wall Street, oil companies, defense contracters, the Iraq-o-crats, etc. Like any other huge pork barrel project, the war has created its own constituencies that won't stand for their pet project being scuttled.

Posted by kafka | April 16, 2008 5:32 PM

To be fair, I think what happened in Iraq was largely sectarian cleansing, not ethnic cleansing. Sunni and Shiite Iraqi Arabs are the same ethnicity, what separates them is their religion (as compared to, say, Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmen or other Iraqi minorities).

Posted by Stefan | April 16, 2008 5:34 PM

"We'll be in Iraq 10 years from now."

No we won't. The Iraqis will see to that.

Stefan, the interesting thing is that not only do we have a sectarian civil war in terms of Sunni vs Shia, we also have an ethnic civil war in the north of Iraq with Turkmen and Arabs vs Kurds, and an inter-religious civil war in the south between Shia and Shia.

So you get three civil wars for the price of one invasion! Who said Bush doesn't understand economics!

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 16, 2008 5:42 PM

Hit me, hit me. Oh the balm of ordered evidence-based thinking.

Posted by Chris Dornan | April 16, 2008 5:56 PM

Leaving is losing. Around one-fourth of ordinary Americans and at least three-fourths of the DC elite like O'Hanlon feel personally involved in American power and prestige. So for them, an American loss feels like a personal loss. Idiots.

Posted by Gary Sugar | April 16, 2008 6:48 PM

well, the surge has succeeded in segragating most of baghdad along religious lines and thus, less fighting. if we leave they might start moving in with each other again and we can't have that.

Posted by dj spellchecka | April 17, 2008 1:50 PM