RUNNING OUT OF TIME TO SURRENDER

"The only thing that these folks seem willing to fight to the death over is…defeat."

I was in Nam during the Tet Offensive in 68. We were celebrating that we had kicked ass. Walter Cronkite and the leftist press was telling the American people that we had suffered a great defeat. The left won and it cost another 2-3 million deaths in Cambodia and the reeducation camps in Viet Nam. When will we ever rid ourselves of these leftist anti American crowd? Sad, but probably never.
-by Gene

This comment comes in a blog entry by Donald Surber. Why did this come up? Well it has to do with eating crow and the Drum principle taken to another new level. See, about a year ago, Kevin Drum said he'd eat crow if the Surge worked, if the increase in troop strength and change of strategy in Iraq gave results. Don Surber is cooking the crow with all the trimmings even as you read this, for Mr Drum:

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly had an interesting take a year ago:

Still, honesty compels me to say that I’m glad this is going to happen. I know this makes me a bad person with no concern for human life etc. etc. (feel free to expand on this sentiment in comments), but at some point we have to come to a conclusion on this stuff. Conservatives long ago convinced themselves against all evidence that we could have won in Vietnam if we’d only added more troops or used more napalm or nuked Hanoi or whatever, and they’re going to do the same thing in Iraq unless we allow them to play this out the way they want. If they don’t get to play the game their way, they’ll spend the next couple of decades trying to persuade the American public that there was nothing wrong with the idea of invading Iraq at all. We just never put the necessary resources into it.

Well, screw that. There’s nothing we can do to stop them anyway, so give ‘em the resources they want. Let ‘em fight the war the way they want. If it works — and after all, stranger things have happened — then I’ll eat some crow [emphasis mine]. But if it doesn’t, there’s a chance that the country will actually learn something from this.

In the spirit of Christmas, I hope Santa brings him a nice big bird this year.

And I don’t mean a turkey.

Chances of Kevin Drum admitting it worked are slim to none, he'll just move the goalposts: it didn't work despite how well it's working because of this new reason I never mentioned before and that is irrelevant to the discussion. Remember, this is the same guy that said he'd betray his principles rather than say anything that might remotely help President Bush. Here's an example of what I mean, with other comments:

“The Surge helped Iraq get on its two feet.”

It didn’t. It temporarily reduced violence. Iraq has no functioning central government that can assert its sovereignty across the country. The “Anbar Awakening,” in which Sunni Arabs took responsibility for security in their province after seeing that the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces couldn’t do so, proves that the Iraqi state is failing, not growing more successful.

Endlessly declaring victory will not produce it. Go find BGN C.D. Alston’s December 2005 statement that the insurgency could no longer sustain itself — this wishful thinking, “last throes” bullsh**t has been going on for years. You’re fantasizing.
-by postwar war


Successful democracies are only built from the ground up. Remember that, “the postwar war”. Do a little historical reading if you’re iffy on the subject.

That is what the surge allowed to happen. That is what has been happening for the past year nearly everywhere in Iraq. That is success, without qualification.
-by Jimmie


Give everything time. Americans are used to instant coffee and remote controlled TV. The war is over. Now we can work on reconciliation of the religious factions. We are Americans. We don’t give up and surrender. We (I) are not controlled by the NY Times and the Washington Post. Think positive.
-by Gene


After the Revolution the US had to face that 10% of its population lay dead and another 15% fled to the other Crown colonies. The Articles of Confederation were very weak and the States were suffering under the weight of the loans taken out to pay for the war. In a few years there were private armies marching around at the behest of the State governments to put down insurrections, to stop Court House burnings which were happening because of land confiscation due to the taxes imposed to pay for the war. In 1786 things were very bad and the Shaysites were mere hours off in being able to gather the weapons necessary to put MA into turmoil and much of the rest of the Northeast.

The very first American government, that ran the war from 1776, was failing and, in many parts of the States, it had failed: it was putting poor farmers into jail, it was not making good on internal loans, the States were having a hard time keeping up with external debt, and minor revolts across the States were threatening a second war because the soldiers from the Revolution had not gotten their pay for years.

That United States of 1786 was not a pretty sight. The call from the Anapolis convention for the 1787 Philadelphia convention was a plea for help by the States to re-think the entire concept of government because the high ideals they had didn’t work well. We are very lucky that the intellectuals had not been killed off or chased off like in Saddam’s Iraq. We are extremely lucky to not only have had one of the best generals *ever* who turned down the thought of a military government after the Revolution, but then who came in to help get a new form of government started. Iraq does not have people like that for the simple reason of their being a threat to Saddam: he had them killed or they went into exile for decades. Iraq can barely remember the legal system that was handed it to the British and that didn’t last long enough to stick, nor that of Ottoman Imperial law before it… the Ba’ath party wiped those away so the few surviving judges are now in their 80s.

Between 1782 and 1787 the entire US was ready to *collapse* because of Statehouses impoverishing their people without much say at all via representative government. Quite a few folks were starting to realize that this was not what they fought for. Iraq does not have the benefit of having a few centuries of liberal western history, of a deep understanding of the common law system or of having deep and committed patriots to help raise their Nation up. They have the great and good fortune of having a ready income supply and a great want to end the killing that has plagued them from tyrants and terrorists since the 1950’s. They do not have a relatively homogeneous population like post-war Germany and Japan, and the Middle Eastern work ethic leaves much to be desired… strange that now factories are re-opening and folks want to get to *work*.

From 1775 to 1786 was 11 years… probably should have written democracy off as a bad job as it couldn’t figure out how to repay debts in a just way. Americans didn’t really want a military dictatorship or junta, so we ‘doubled down’ for a second shot at it.

Iraq after 5 years? Barely through the half-life of most insurgencies. I am frankly astonished at how *quickly* things are going: this COIN engagement is unprecedented in military history. This is on a much faster path than Britain, France or any other major industrialized power, including the US in the Philippines, has ever done a COIN engagement.

And people *complain*?

The last guy to go *faster* marched an Army of 10,000 from Greece to India and took over everything in his path but with a side-trip to Egypt first. Guy by the name of Alexander the Great, although his victories would not outlast his short life. We, unfortunately, don’t have that sort of world to work with, and may end up taking a distant second place in COIN work compared to him, but possibly make it stick for a good long time. We are outdoing the Brits in the Malay and the French in Algeria, not that it was a great success, but it more or less worked until the subsequent revolution after that.

Complaints?

If we cannot reach out to those that have been rescued from tyranny, from barbaric terrorists and from despotism, and we are the ones doing that rescuing, then we do not deserve our own democracy. Because we paid much more in blood than others have and it is dear to us, especially after winning a war. Our lives are dear, but liberty dearer still and we know that cost comes not easy, nor cheap, nor quickly as our OWN history attests to. But those are liberal, western and civilized ideals… apparently many in the US no longer have those. When we forget these things our own liberty and freedom are soon to chase away into the night, because they do not come cheap nor quickly. And the payment to win liberty is blood.
-by ajacksonian


Hey, Postie, got’cher postwar “war” roundup right here, man. Scholarly, reasonable, researched.

I grew up believing the MSM, Uncle Walter and the rest. You can’t imagine a world where everyone, (and I mean everyone) believed in the Media as the guardians of fact. Actually, we didn’t give it a thought, as to what we read or saw. It wasn’t until Dan Rather was caught in a lie that crossed my area of expertise (typesetting) that I finally quit believing them. And long ago, when I learned to think for myself.

The above linked essay from Commentary Mag just sickens me, because I realize I watched lies every night, while college hippie protesters insisted that the military were the liars and worse.

There’s no shame in being deluded, only in choosing to stay that way.

The article won’t fit your narrative, but, hey, I used to be a skull full of mush, myself.
-by Joan of Argghh!


Postwar War: the reason we had no IED’s in Japan is very simple: instead of fighting the “kindler, gentler” war that liberals want, we burned Japanese alive until they got the notion “opposing Americans is death.” That’s how you win a war quickly and finally.
-by SDN


Victory throughout history has never been defined as the victor leaving a country better off than it was before the war. The United States has done so many a time, but it has never been part of the victory. It has been done after the victory. The vicotry itself has always left the losing nation in a state of shambles.
Now the Lefties in this country want to define victory as having defeated another nation, in this case Iraq and Afghanistan, and somehow left them better off than they were prior to the war (see the requirement above that the Iraqi government be able to function better than the US Congress in order for conservatives to declare “we won”)! Insane? Yes, but that’s the “reality based community” for you. There isn’t a single dictionary in the entire world that would describe victory as the Lefties demand it be described now. There hasn’t been a single victory in the history of the human race that is consistent with what Lefties now want to define as victory.
If you are unwilling to fight for victory, you don’t get to define it, either.
-by Diggs


What’s odd about the left’s perspective in general and Drum’s in particular on Vietnam is that we DID win, militarily speaking. Khe Sanh was a disaster of epic proportions for the NVA, the Marines retook Hue, Tet just about annihilated the VC, the Linebacker bombing campaigns brought the North to its knees, the mining of Haiphong was economically ruinous… I could go on. There was no question of “nuking Hanoi” any more than we needed to nuke Pyongyang to keep them out of Seoul; in both cases, we had successfully established a peace treaty, and all we had to do was keep a viable threat of renewed bombing/mining/fighting around to enforce it.

These people act as though we did not successfully defend S Korea for 50 years.

The lesson of SE Asia is simple and twofold: one, don’t abandon your allies before they can defend themselves; two, peace under Communist dictatorship is not much better than war. Somehow the left instead took the lesson as “America can’t win a difficult war,” perhaps largely because the second half is something they still refuse to admit they were horribly, tragically wrong about.

*Well, if not a peace treaty, at least a cessation of hostilities.
-by TallDave

Remember, it's never too late to declare failure and defeat. You can always find some reason that overwhelming evidence is false: just move the standards of victory to unreachable levels. If there's any violence then it's clearly not a victory. If there's any political unrest or instability, it's a failure.

Looking around the world, countries with a stable government and little violence in their borders are the exception and not the rule. We all want Iraq to be one of those exceptions, and the longer the coalition troops stay and help rebuild, encourage reconciliation, and protect the country until it's ready to stand on its own, the sooner and more likely this is to take place. But it's a fool's metric to presume that unless Iraq looks like a more stable and peaceful America then we've failed utterly.

I'll say it once again: the coalition won the war in 2003, unequivocally and unquestionably. It was an absolute, stunning, and unprecedented success of overwhelming victory. The mission of conquering Iraq was accomplished, without any possibility of historically accurate and informed debate.

The rebuilding and pacification of the country is another story. It takes years, even decades to finally calm a nation down after being defeated. Look at France in WW2, the Nazis had absolute control over the country, yet faced constant sabboteur and insurgent problems. Were they fighting France in a war? No, they beat France in about a month, and were having security problems with patriots who were fighting the tyranny. Over and over again through history there have been thousands of examples of this: a conquered nation fights and causes trouble for a long, long time after the war is over.

Only in some modern days in very unusual and a-historical situations has this ever, ever been different. Post WW2 reconstruction was a bizarre anomaly in human history, and we didn't really conquer those nations anyway. We destroyed their army, tore down their government, helped them rebuild, and they are back in charge of their own destiny again, insofar as is humanly possible. It took ten years to get Japan to the point we could let them take charge again, yet people want us to abandon Iraq after four? The gross, inexcusable historical ignorance on display so often is difficult to stomach, it frustrates me deeply.

And guys like Kevin Drum who'll never, ever admit they might possibly in some small way be wrong about Iraq do so not out of principle or personal belief, but out of the fear that their political enemies might gain in some way from it, and that simply cannot be allowed, no matter what damage it does to their stated causes or ideals.

I'm hoping, Mr Drum, that the country does learn something from this: that you cannot trust the left for whom political victory trumps all other causes and interests. That you do not abandon someone who has been promised help. That the US doesn't bail on an effort simply because it is difficult and takes longer than a year. That honor means doing what is hard because it is right. That we learned from Vietnam and won't abandon our troops or betray their efforts. I hope we do learn from all this.

For those, more honest, honorable, and noble among the anti-war crowd, here are some recipes that you might want to try, courtesy commenter DavidL.

Iraq, Surrender, Drum Principle, The Surge